James Gould Cozzens is half a generation younger than Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, and his background differs from theirs in a way that would not have concerned Dos Passos and Faulkner but would have aroused Fitzgerald’s envy. Cozzens’ background is conservative upper-middle-class, almost exactly what Fitzgerald always wished his had been. Because it was not, Fitzgerald spent his youth, as he once said: “in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.” He could never stop thinking of himself as a parvenu; Cozzens has the assurance, even arrogance, of a man who has never known a moment’s doubt that he is not. He also has the admirably tough-minded rationalism of his kind, and the outspoken honesty of his treatment of sex in By Love Possessed offended a good many readers—including some pretty advanced thinkers—who pride themselves on their liberalism and are eager to defend equally detailed accounts of sexual acts when they are glamorized by transcendental rhetoric of one kind or another.
Cozzens comes of a family that lived for over a century in Newport, Rhode Island, where his great-grandfather was mayor of the town and governor of the state during the Civil War. Cozzens himself grew up on Staten Island, then a rural suburb of New York, and was educated at Kent and Harvard. He was precociously intelligent and once drove Kent’s famous headmaster, Dr. Sill, into a formidable rage by arguing with him about religion (“I was the boy intellectual who didn’t believe in God, scorned healthy exercise, and subscribed to the New Republic“).
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