New York’s skyline tells the story of the city, its towers etched clear against the clouds like letters on a pale page, or so said Henry James in his elegant 1906 essay “New York Revisited.” The city’s skyscrapers, James observed, are plain planks of stone, ornamented only by their own lights, “each light having a Read More
Louis Auchincloss, renowned for his astute chronicling of the moneyed class, was clearly not prone to dawdle; one simply can’t imagine where he would have found the time. In his 92 years, the lawyer and author published over 65 works of fiction and nonfiction while practicing law full time until his retirement in 1986. So Read More
Of novelist Louis Auchincloss, fellow American scribe Gore Vidal (whose stepfather happened to be an Auchincloss) once declared, “Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. … Not since Dreiser has an American writer had Read More
Louis Auchincloss, novelist of WASP New York, has died at 92 of a stroke.
Auchincloss had worked as a lawyer before turning to writing, and became known for his chronicles of the Upper East Side’s ruling class. His 1965 novel The Rector of Justin was nominated for a Pulitzer. Contemporary literary trends seemed to move Read More
The preferred caterer of Manhattan high society, Sean Driscoll, described his longtime client, the late philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor, as a scotch-on-the-rocks kind of gal who spent her 100th birthday dining with the likes of Kofi Annan and Barbara Walters.
Taking the witness stand on Thursday, April 30, Mr. Driscoll also recalled how Read More
Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie (St. Martin’s Press, $23.95) is the latest from “gender expert” Susan Shapiro Barash. I picked it up out of idle curiosity (are women’s reasons for lying really different from men’s?) and would have put it straight back down (the writing is shockingly bad), Read More
THE HEADMASTER’S DILEMMA
By Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $25
Louis Auchincloss’ fans will be happy to celebrate his 90th birthday later this month with The Headmaster’s Dilemma, a novel that puts his grand total at more than 60 books of assorted fiction and nonfiction. Many were written while he was a Read More
The Scarlet Letters , by Louis Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin, 177 pages, $24.
“They will come no more, / The old men with beautiful manners.” So said Ezra Pound in 1915, and history has brought us to a point where, one feels, it must really be true. And so-in a post-9/11, BlackBerry-handheld, 1,000-channel, Jonathan Franzen and Read More
Her Infinite Variety , by Louis Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin, 224 pages, $25.
Louis Auchincloss has always made his readers vaguely uncomfortable. Americans, raised on great national myths like egalitarianism and the meritocracy, prefer not to believe that vast concentrations of power reside in the hands of Eastern bankers and corporate chieftains, who conduct the business Read More
