By Love Possessed — James Gould Cozzens

During forty-nine hours in the life of Arthur Winner, the leading lawyer in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1950's, By Love Possessed portrays all the myriad aspects of love. Over the first two days, Cozzens masterfully lays out this community's many interlinked relationships. There is the love between parent and child, brother and sister; there is the brotherly love among the law partners in Winner's firm; and there is love in marriage and outside. Throughout, Arthur Winner is the man of the moment, but the revelations of the novel's final hour force him to confront the deeper meaning of his world and of himself.