James Gould Cozzens, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

James Gould Cozzens

American novelist

Date of Birth: 19-Aug-1903

Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Date of Death: 09-Aug-1978

Profession: screenwriter, writer, novelist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Leo

James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 – August 9, 1978) was an American novelist and short story writer. He drew critical acclaim early, but did not achieve popularity until well into his career.
Some of his later works were controversial among critics. Today he is often grouped with his contemporaries John O'Hara and John P.
Marquand, but his work is generally considered more challenging.
His biographer Matthew Bruccoli, in describing the style of the best seller By Love Possessed, noted the following qualities in Cozzens' prose: ...
long sentences, frequent use of parenthetical constructions, rhetorical questions, elaborate parallelism, inclusion of unfamiliar words, unacknowledged (classical) quotations, ironically intended word choices, a habit of following a formal statement with a clarifying or deflating colloquialism, polyptoton (repetition of a word in different cases and inflections, as in "result's result"), inverted word order, double negatives, the custom of defining a word or providing alternatives for it, and periodic sentences in which the meaning becomes clear at the end.
The effect of these conjoined elements can be a deliberate density of expression ... Cozzens was a critic of modernism, and of realism more leftist than his own, and he was quoted in a featured article in Time as saying (perhaps somewhat in jest), "I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up."