At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's.

Bruccoli University of Pittsburgh Press 1981
James Gould Cozzens: A Checklist Compiled by James B. The central figures in his books are primarily professional middle-class white men — assistant district attorney Abner Coates in The Just and the Unjust doctor George Bull in The Last Adam Episcopal priest Ernest Cudlipp in Men and Brethren U. She died on January 30 1978.

Despite initial critical acclaim his popularity came gradually. He is often grouped today with his contemporaries John O'Hara and John P. 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 "I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.