books in order

James Gould Cozzens Books In Order

Novels

  1. S. S. San Pedro (1931)
  2. The Last Adam (1933)
  3. Castaway (1934)
  4. Men and Brethren (1936)
  5. Ask Me Tomorrow (1940)
  6. The Just and the Unjust (1942)
  7. Guard of Honor (1948)
  8. By Love Possessed (1957)
  9. Morning Noon and Night (1968)
  10. A Flower in Her Hair (1974)
  11. A Rope for Dr. Webster (1976)

Collections

  1. Children and Others (1965)
  2. Just Representations (1978)

Non fiction

  1. Selected Notebooks: 1960-1967 (1984)
  2. A Time of War (1984)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

James Gould Cozzens Books Overview

Castaway

An unspecified catastrophe has overtaken New York. Mr. Lecky, the sole survivor, finds himself in a great department store which has also escaped destruction. Here is everything a human being might need, not only to support existence but to afford luxury and comfort. But not quite everything. As the story unfolds with frightening rapidity, it becomes clear that Mr. Cozzens has constructed a modern parable of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, one with powerful implication philosophical, psychological, mystical for the survival of modern man. ‘Whatever the conclusion at which the reader arrives, what is beyond doubt is that the book is an interesting and distinguished piece of work.’ London Times Literary Supplement. ‘Mr. Cozzens is no mean artist in prose, and he has original ideas. He works also with admirable economy of mean, and with realistic detail that rivets the imagination.’ Saturday Review. ‘No one who has ever read a novel of his has forgotten it.’ Bernard De Voto.

Men and Brethren

The Reverend Ernest Cudlipp, almost 45, urbane and intelligent, is vicar of a prominent Fifth Avenue church in New York. Men and Brethren follows him through a singularly eventful summer weekend, his dealings with parishioners and friends, his professional and personal relationships. His solutions to the problems he confronts are characteristically forthright, often unorthodox, a product of the struggle between his beliefs and his experience. Mr. Cozzens has written a deceptively powerful novel, filled with ironical intelligence, incisive portraiture, and onrushing action. ‘Altogether vivid, exciting and unusual it makes a deep impression.’ Cyril Connolly, New Statesman. ‘A remarkable portrait The plot is so suave and sophisticated as to be completely beguiling Cudlipp himself, no matter how much you may dislike him, and perhaps because of that dislike, is virulently alive.’ New York Times. ‘A brilliantly integrated and authentic characterization Mr. Cozzens deserves almost special praise for creating a clergyman as real as Ernest Cudlipp.’ Louis Kronenberger, The Nation. It’s a perfect gem and should be a must on the list of everyone involved in the church and in the modern novel at its best. Churchman.

The Just and the Unjust

A dramatic novel of lawyers, and the law, this is a brilliant account of a murder trial that dominates the life of a town for one exciting week.

Guard of Honor

Guard of Honor is a neglected masterpiece that stands comparison with the greatest novels of the Second World War essayist Noel Perrin deemed it ‘probably the best war novel of the twentieth century.’ James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens’s immense canvas. As Noel Perrin commented in The Washington Post Book World: ‘There is material for two or three hundred movies in Guard of Honor.’ ‘No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it,’ said Orville Prescott in The New York Times. As Brendan Gill observed in The New Yorker: ‘Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork.’ The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

By Love Possessed

During forty nine hours in the life of Arthur Winner, the leading lawyer in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1950’s, By Love Possessed portrays all the myriad aspects of love. Over the first two days, Cozzens masterfully lays out this community’s many interlinked relationships. There is the love between parent and child, brother and sister; there is the brotherly love among the law partners in Winner’s firm; and there is love in marriage and outside. Throughout, Arthur Winner is the man of the moment, but the revelations of the novel’s final hour force him to confront the deeper meaning of his world and of himself.

Just Representations

To mark James Gould Cozzens’s seven ty fifth birthday, 19 August 1978, the Southern Illinois University Press in conjunction with Harcourt Brace Jovan ovich takes exceptional pride in pub lishing this rich sampling of the work of a master novelist. James Gould Cozzens, whose literary career has spanned 13 novels and 54 years, was born in Chicago in 1903. After graduation from Kent School in Connecticut he entered Harvard Uni versity in 1922, which he left in 1924 to devote his full time to writing. His excellence as a writer has been recog nized by critics and the public alike. Six of his books were Book of the Month Club selections. Guard of Honor was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fic tion, and By Love Possessed one of the notable best sellers in contemporary fiction won the Howells Medal of The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960 an award which is conferred every five years for that period s most distinguished work of American fiction. Cozzens s dedication to his craft has produced a body of fiction unsurpassed in its fidelity to life and its hard intel ligence. Since the 1930s he has been unchallenged in his ability to portray the professional man in American soci ety and has written the best American novels about clergymen, lawyers, and military men. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of this volume, notes in his Introduction that James Gould Cozzens has sought to write only to say as precisely as he can what by standards of his own he judged worth saying, standards which seem best summed up in the dictum from Samuel Johnson from which the main title of this work is taken: Noth ing can please many, and please long, but Just Representations of general nature. The complete novel and the selec tions from six of Cozzens s major novels included here furnish a comprehensive overview of and an introduction to the canon of a major American novelist. The book provides a permanently usable collection for new readers of James Gould Cozzens as well as an omnibus for the initiated.

Related Authors