By Love Possessed, an enormously successful best-seller, provoked Time magazine, in which he expressed unfashionable opinions with aristocratic disdain. The consequences of this affair were long-lasting, but since the late 1970’s there has been a renewal of critical appreciation of his work.

Cozzens’s style is often elaborate, filled with allusions and choked with subordination often to the point of obscurity. His habit of referring to his characters by their full names is indicative of his self-consciously formal style, one that distances him from his characters and, to a certain extent, from his readers. Independent of the literary mainstream, Cozzens successfully introduced a substance and a style counter to contemporary fashions.