What 1940s Novel Was Set in a Fictional Version of Doylestown?

I know that John O'Hara (1905-1970) set many of his novels and short stories in Gibbsville, a fictional version of Pottsville, the seat of Schuylkill County. Wasn't there a writer of the same era (besides James Michener) who set a novel in a fictional version of Doylestown? - H.W., Doylestown

You are thinking of James Gould Cozzens and his 1942 novel, "The Just and The Unjust."

The novel is about a 1939 murder trial in the sleepy county seat of Childerstown. Cozzens never mentions the name of the county or the state, but the setting is based on Doylestown.

To research his novel, Cozzens spent many hours attending trials in the Bucks County Courthouse, built in 1878. He dedicated the book to Edward G. Biester, who served as the county's only assistant district attorney from 1932 to 1938, district attorney from 1938 to 1949, and a county judge from 1949 to 1970. (Biester's son, Edward G. Biester Jr., represented Bucks County in Congress from 1967 to 1977 and was a county judge from 1980 to 2006.)

Cozzens' fictional courthouse is located at Court and Broad streets, just like the actual courthouse, and its description is similar to the real one.  

The Childerstown courthouse had been erected in 1880, and architects of the period either did not understand the principles of acoustics or held them secondary to that day's taste for rich stateliness and fancy grandeur. Abutting on the back side of the clock-towered stone structure which faced Court Street over steps, walks, and a small fountain, and which housed the record rooms and clerks' offices, the architects built as a main courtroom the recognizable dodecagonal [12-sided] chapter house of some monstrous Gothic cathedral whose incredible corporate body presumably numbered five hundred canons.

Inside this curious edifice with its pinnacled buttresses, vast hip roof, and stilted, ecclesiastical high windows, the shape of the courtroom was a semicircle. Nine concentric tiers of oak seats looked over the railed enclosure of the bar to the great bench, a massive and solid black-walnut pile. Behind the bench the tan, sand-finished wall rose thirty-five feet to a round spoked skylight of stained glass.

Though impressive enough in appearance, the high wall served as a sounding board. Words addressed to the Court went echoing up, reverberated across the void until they hit the oiled and varnished matchboard of the ceiling, whose sloping panels were supported by hammer beams. Refracted six new ways, a medley of booming sounds came down on the tiered seats...Those in the upper rows had little chance of hearing anything intelligible. 

"The Just and The Unjust" is about as far as you can get from a "Perry Mason" mystery or a "Peyton Place" expose. The 434-page novel is not filled with excitement, but it is packed with details and dialogue that convey what the legal process and small-town life was like in the 1930s.

The trial - the county's first one for murder in more than a decade - concerns two gangsters who are charged with first-degree murder after a drug dealer is kidnapped for ransom and shot to death. Although the defendants are not accused of actually shooting the dealer, they face the death penalty because they participated in a felony that resulted in murder.

Since there is no doubt the defendants were in on the kidnapping, the entire case revolves around the legal concept of felony murder. Cozzens eschews the traditional "whodunit" aspect of fictional trials to focus on often-tedious courtroom testimony and procedures.

The defendants and the victim are "foreigners" (meaning they come from outside the county) and are definitely not sympathetic characters. This serves to underscore Cozzens' theme that the legal system guarantees a fair trial to everyone, whether they are members of the country club or members of the underworld.

The novel is not a dry legal treatise, however. Cozzens keeps it interesting by weaving the narrative around the protagonist, Assistant District Attorney Abner Coates, and bringing in a large cast of supporting characters and several subplots.

Coates, whose father and grandfather were county judges, is a young lawyer prosecuting the case alongside veteran District Attorney Martin Bunting on behalf of the Commonwealth (an obvious reference to Pennsylvania).

Coates, a Republican, is thinking of running for district attorney if Bunting resigns after the trial, but he needs the support of the county Republican Party chairman, Jesse Gearhart. Coates dislikes Gearhart and resents his absolute control of county politics and government.

The county had been Republican for almost a generation. This meant that the Republicans were entrenched in power; they had all the jobs. Having all the jobs meant having also an increasing monopoly of the ambitious, able and experienced men. Ambitious men could see the situation; able men could not expect to get anywhere with the Democrats; and as for experience, a Democrat could never be elected, and so could never get any experience.

In theory, the people could, and surely ought to, enounce [decide] the nominations at the primaries; but in practice what they did at the primaries was to accept the men Jesse designated. At the elections, which the Republicans were sure to win, the people then elected those men to office. If this did not mean that Jesse had the whole say about who was to fill every elective public office, what did it mean?

This passage could apply to Bucks County today, even though registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans.

That doesn't mean everything in the novel is a mirror image of the real Doylestown and Bucks County of that era.

Gearhart, for example, is described as a Childerstown businessman whose political influence does not extend beyond the county. The real Republican boss in the 1930s, Joseph R. Grundy, was a Bristol industrialist who was a major figure in state and national Republican politics (even serving as an appointed U.S. senator in 1930) and who owned the county's two daily newspapers.

In the novel, the Childerstown Daily Examiner is owned and edited by Maynard Longstreet, who also is the reporter covering the trial. Cozzens' description of the newspaper pretty much reflects the real Doylestown Daily Intelligencer back then.

A stranger unfolding the paper would see nothing worth reading--"Local Mill Workers Receive Pay Boost"; "Women Voters League Visits County Seat"; "Warwick Auxiliary Installs Officers"; "Bible Class Sponsors Saratoga Luncheon"" "Wed in Newmarket": "Former Music Teacher Welcomed"; "Blaze on Farrell Farm"; "Hart Home Scene of Anniversary Party." But when you knew the mill and some of the workers, when you were a member of the Women Voters League, or the Warwick Auxiliary, or the Saratoga Bible Class; when the girl or the man married at Newmarket had been at school with you; when the former music teacher had taught you; or when the Farrell farm was right down the road, and you could remember the day twenty-five years ago of the Harts' wedding, each headline started up importuning the eye, aborbing the attention.

In a subplot that could be ripped from today's headlines, a male teacher at Childerstown High School is arrested for fondling teenage girls in his school office. While still involved in the murder trial, Coates and Bunting handle the case. Even Jesse Gearhart gets into the act, because he sits on the school board, which holds a special meeting to accept the teacher's resignation.

Despite this incident, Childerstown is depicted not as sin city, but as a slow-paced burg. The three-man police force has little to do other than arrest drunks and write traffic tickets.

At the corner before the county administration building Abner saw the uniformed figure of Bill Ortt, the chief of the three Childerstown policemen, crossing toward the obelisk of the Civil War monument on which moonlight fell so bright that the names of battles, raised in relief on the surfaces of the shaft, could be read--Spotsylvania, Brandy Station, Cold Harbor. Bill Ortt recognized the car and lifted a hand to Abner. Moonlight glinted on the big slate roof of the courthouse and a few lights burned in the jail behind. Abner drove out West Court Street, past the less frequent houses, with not a car on the road nor a person in sight.

On another evening, Coates drives past Beulah Cemetery, a stand-in for the real Doylestown Cemetery. Cozzens writes:

...about 1850 the bounds were much enlarged by avenues extended across the neighboring fields and planted with hard maples. These trees now made a fine show, serenely quartering the jumble of plinths and monoliths, of mean little temple-shaped mausoleums, or crosses and urns and angels, that seemed to show how all the dead had been in life vain and pretentious, and in death left a memory cherished by imbeciles and vulgarians. Abner thought that he would rather be buried, if he had any say about it, down in the yard of the old Friends Meeting House; but since the Coateses were Presbyterians this was unlikely...

For anyone who knows Doylestown, these descriptions of Childerstown give the novel a special appeal. But the book stands on its own even if a reader has never heard of Doylestown.

While not a best seller when published in 1942, "The Just and The Unjust" received favorable reviews from the New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Saturday Review of Literature and other periodicals. It was named a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Henry Canby, who reviewed the novel for the Book-of-the-Month Club, wrote: "Except for Sinclair Lewis, it hard to think of a novel that is so thoroughly American as this one. I mean that is really a mirror of a small American town, in which everyone and everything appears without distortion... If I were asked by an intelligent European to give him a book that would take him into the heart of everyday America, I would give him this one."

During World War II, Cozzens served as an officer at the headquarters of the Army Air Forces. He drew on his experiences to write "Guard of Honor" in 1948, which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific" won the previous year.)

Cozzens had his biggest success with the publication of "By Love Possessed" in 1957. Although critical reviews were mixed, the novel topped The New York Times best seller list and was loosely adapted into a 1961 film of the same name, starring Lana Turner.

Cozzens and his wife, Sylvia, who was also his agent, moved in 1958 to a farm in Williamstown, Mass., in the Berkshires. Cozzens became reclusive and wrote infrequently. His final novel, "Morning Noon and Night" was published in 1968.

In 1973, the Cozzenses moved to Florida, where they spent their final years. Sylvia Cozzens died on Jan. 30, 1978. James Cozzens died on Aug. 9, 1978, 10 days before he would have turned 75.

Although Cozzens never attained the fame of Hemingway, Faulkner or Steinbeck, he was regarded as one of the foremost American novelists of the 20th century.

Editor's note - If you are interested in reading "The Just and The Unjust," no copies are listed in Bucks County public library catalog, but there are several in the Montgomery County public library system (www.mclinc.org). They should be available through inter-library loan.