Guard Of Honor: A Novel

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Every major war. . . has produced at least one masterpiece. For the Civil War, it's The Red Badge of Courage. For World War 1, A Farewell to Arms. As for World War II, there are numerous candidates. . . The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, The Caine Mutiny, maybe a James Jones—and then there is a book that I think will one day be recognized as better than any of these: James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor." —Noel Perrin, Washington Post Book World

A neglected masterpiece that stands comparison with the greatest novels of the Second World War

James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida.

"No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it," said Orville Prescott in The New York Times.

"Every page of it gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork." - New Yorker

"Wise, witty, technically brilliant, utterly engrossing." - Orville Prescott, New York Times

"Every major war. . . has produced at least one masterpiece. For the Civil War, it's The Red Badge of Courage. For World War I, A Farewell to Arms. As for World War II, there are numerous candidates. . . The Naked and the Dead, Catch 22, The Caine Mutiny, maybe a James Jones—and then there is a book that I thin, will one day be recognized as better than any of these: James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor." - Noel Perrin, Washington Post Book World