An Evening with Edmund Morris: Guard of Honor and the Morality of War

Edmund Morris, the distinguished biographer and author of a new collection of literary essays, speaks about James Gould Cozzens’s great war novel Guard of Honor. Cozzens, born in New York in 1903, has been unjustly forgotten. But since 1948, when Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize, a consistent body of criticism has held it to be the supreme piece of American fiction emerging from World War II. Although it rises to a shocking climax, it is primarily a study in the morality of war.