By Love Possessed is a novel written by James Gould Cozzens in the middle 1950s. It was published on August 26, 1957, by Harcourt Brace and Company, and became a critically acclaimed best-seller. In 1960, it was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal, an award given every five years to the best novel of the previous five years. The novel was turned into a feature film in which Lana Turner co-starred. By Love Possessed was one of Cozzens's "professional novels", whose stories presented fully developed characters and placed a special emphasis on the details of their work.
