James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 – August 9, 1978) was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer whose work enjoyed an unusual degree of popular success and critical acclaim for more than three decades. His 1949 Pulitzer win was for the WWII race novel Guard of Honor, which more than one critic considered one of the most important accounts of the war. His 1957 Pulitzer nomination was for the best-selling novel By Love Possessed, which was later made into a popular 1961 film. Culturally conservative critics' widespread acclaim for "By Love Possessed", along with a controversial 1957 interview that Cozzens gave to Time, led to an aggressive backlash by author Irving Howe in the New Republic and avant-garde critic Dwight Macdonald in Commentary. Macdonald's essay is still considered "the most persuasively devastating review of the century" more than fifty years later. The criticism, aimed as much at critics catering to a middle- rather than highbrow sensibility as the author himself, did extensive damage to Cozzens' reputation, both during the last 20 years of his life, and posthumously. In recent years, there have been multiple attempts at resuscitating Cozzens' place in the literary pantheon. D.G. Myers called him "perhaps America's best forgotten novelist." Writer Joseph Epstein has offered similar praise, both in an essay for Commentary magazine, as well as in a chapter for his book Plausible Prejudices. The late biographer and academic editor Matthew J. Bruccoli extended those efforts in a biography and related scholarly work. There has also been recent interest in screenplays based on his work: in 2018, the Hollywood Reporter reported that the rights to Sam Peckinpah's screenplay Castaway, based on Cozzens' novella, had been acquired by a producer. Writing Cozzens published his first novel Confusion, in 1924 while still a student at Harvard. A few months later, ill and in debt, he withdrew from school and moved to New Brunswick, where he wrote Michael Scarlett, a second novel. Neither book sold well or was widely read, and to sustain himself, Cozzens traveled to Cuba to teach children of American residents, which is where he began to write short stories and gather material for the novels Cock Pit (1928) and The Son of Perdition (1929). He met Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten, a literary agent with Brandt & Kirkpatrick, whom he married at city hall in New York City on December 27, 1927, and who successfully edited and marketed his