NOVEL

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor. This 1948 novel about life on a Florida air base nine months before D-Day won the Pulitzer Prize, then slipped through the cracks and has yet to resurface–yet it’s by far the best American novel written by a World War II veteran, the only one that can stand up to direct comparison with Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Tough-minded and stoic, richly detailed yet tautly controlled, Cozzens’ portrait of men and women preparing for war is an unrecognized classic of twentieth-century fiction. Still in print, amazingly enough (TT).