The Just and the Unjust

by James Gould Cozzens

Cozzens was regarded as a major American novelist in the middle of the 20th century, and he has fallen by the wayside in terms of public esteem. But this is just a very, very good book about a small-town lawyer. It’s a beautiful portrait of a time and a place. If anybody really ever wants to know what it was like to be a small-town lawyer in the United States in the 1930s, people whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers were lawyers in a small town and want to know what their life was like, I would say read this book.