Because he was a private man, and (as a writer) a professional who believed that his time was best spent in writing, in the perfecting and mastering of his craft, published sources of biographical information on James Gould Cozzens are not abundant. Once launched on his career as a novelist at the age of twenty-one, Cozzens did very little else; and in this sense the story of his life is the story of his art. The best single source of biographical information on Cozzens is Matthew J. Bruccoli's introduction to Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader (1978), which also contains essays by Cozzens with significant autobiographical content.

James Gould Cozzens was born on 19 August 1903 in Chicago, Illinois, where his parents, both New Englanders, were visiting. Taking an executive position with a New York manufacturing company in 1906, Cozzens's father moved the family to Staten Island, which was still a...