[There are a half-dozen themes basic to Cozzens' writing which unite his disparate works.] Perhaps the most important of them is the concept of "earned" morality, the discovery of a moral principle through suffering on its behalf. As early as Confusion, Cozzens has one of the characters say:

Despite all teaching there must come an instance in every person's life when such a truth is proved or disproved in such a way as to be convincing, or it is never honestly believed.

                                              (pp. 480-81)

Cozzens' second theme, and a rather more Christian one that seems at times to run almost directly counter to the Stoicism of the first, is the radical imperfectability of man. This emerges sharply in The Last Adam, which celebrates a doctor who is lazy, irresponsible, bigoted, self-indulgent, lecherous, arrogant, and at most points pretty well uncontaminated by the Hippocratic ideal. The book defends him...