Louis Auchincloss: A Writer's Life - Paperback

by Carol Gelderman (Author)

The definitive literary biography of a New York "living landmark"

With more than sixty published novels, short story collections, and works of criticism and history to his credit, Louis Auchincloss is the very definition of prolific. He has garnered widespread acclaim for his unrivaled critical observations of Manhattan circles of wealth and influence, the same elite society in which he moves. In her definitive literary biography of Auchincloss, Carol Gelderman traces the iconic writer from boarding school to his early literary forays at Yale, from law school to naval service in World War II, and then to Wall Street, chronicling his success in both legal and literary careers. Gelderman notes that Auchincloss's greatest personal struggle--and perhaps greatest accomplishment--was to reconcile his competing impulses to follow his father's path to prominence in law and to write the stories of his world.

"Of all our novelists," Gore Vidal has observed, Auchincloss "is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs." Gelderman shows how Auchincloss came to be our preeminent novelist of manners and power in this update to her 1993 biography of the only writer to be named a "living landmark" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. She offers keen insights into his life, careers, and writings, including his best-selling novels Portrait in Brownstone, The House of Five Talents, and The Rector of Justin as well as the more recent works The Scarlet Letters, East Side Story, and The Young Apollo and Other Stories.

Back Jacket

Of all our novelists, Gore Vidal has observed, Louis Auchincloss "is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs". One reason, of course, is that few other American novelists have been able, as Auchincloss has, to observe America's privileged class from the inside. Indeed, he has led a fascinating double life. On the one hand, he is a Wall Street lawyer and a public symbol of New York's old-money aristocracy. On the other, he has devoted a long literary career to an unsparing scrutiny of that world, a scrutiny he pursued undeterred even when he knew his portrayals were startling or outraging his peers. Raised by a sternly traditional father and an unusually sensitive, bookish mother, young Louis Auchincloss absorbed all the precepts of his class at boarding school and at Yale. For years he was torn between his urge to write and his sense that he was destined - and expected - to follow his father's path to Wall Street. His greatest struggle, and perhaps his greatest accomplishment, was to reconcile those two impulses, becoming a prominent attorney as well as a prolific author. His dozens of critically acclaimed books include the best-selling novels Portrait in Brownstone, The House of Five Talents, and The Rector of Justin, as well as works on French history and New York's Gilded Age. Carol Gelderman writes perceptively of Louis Auchincloss's fiction, a body of work that establishes him as our greatest novelist of manners since Edith Wharton. This is much more, however, than a literary study. It takes us into the corridors of some of America's most powerful, yet least publicized institutions, from the GrotonSchool to Sullivan and Cromwell. And it shows how, against considerable odds, one writer carved a niche where a memorable literary talent could flourish.

Author Biography

Carol Gelderman is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Orleans and the author of eight books, including Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist and Mary McCarthy: A Life.