SOURCE: "Moral Realism: The Development of an Attitude," in James Gould Cozzens: New Acquist of True Experience, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Southern Illinois University Press, 1979, pp. 44-62.

Scholes is an educator and author of several books on literature, including Elements of Fiction (1968) and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985). In the following essay, he discusses the evolution of Cozzens's literary style and his rejection of romanticism in favor of moral realism.

The following quotations may be read as a dialogue. The first speaker is a young man in a novel of 1929. The second is an old man in a novel of 1942.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or...