Eclipse

Such honors and distinction, one thought in 1957, would assure Cozzens of an enduring literary reputation. Yet now who reads his novels? Who not yet in middle age has even heard his name? He is certainly not read in college courses devoted to modern American fiction, where one naturally finds such contemporaries of Cozzens as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner —but also Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Burroughs, writers of little or no reputation in the late Fifties.

After about 1960, while other and perhaps less significant novelists rose to popularity, Cozzens virtually disappeared from our collective literary consciousness. His last book, Morning, Noon, and Night, received scattered and generally hostile notices when it was published in 1968, a bad year for books as for many other manifestations of American culture.

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James A. Epperson

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Fiction

Such honors and distinction, one thought in 1957, would assure Cozzens of an enduring literary reputation. Yet now who reads his novels? Who not yet in middle age has even heard his name? He is certainly not read in college courses devoted to modern American fiction, where one naturally finds such contemporaries of Cozzens as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner —but also Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Burroughs, writers of little or no reputation in the late Fifties.

After about 1960, while other and perhaps less significant novelists rose to popularity, Cozzens virtually disappeared from our collective literary consciousness. His last book, Morning, Noon, and Night, received scattered and generally hostile notices when it was published in 1968, a bad year for books as for many other manifestations of American culture.