Legacy MattersI consider Louis Auchincloss one of the finest writers of our times. He wrote some 50 books over his life while a full time practicing lawyer and I have about 20 of them. I began reading him while working at a law firm on Wall Street just so I could begin to understand the old line New York WASP. The insights I gained were invaluable and soon I became hooked on his literary ability to tell revealing stories about a segment of the population that is otherwise opaque.
Of hIs most famous book, The Rector of Justin, Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post
"The Rector of Justin" is a "prep school novel" in the same way that "Moby-Dick" is a "whaling novel." It uses the environment of a fictitious Episcopal school for boys, Justin Martyr -- "named for the early martyr and scholar who tried to reconcile the thinking of the Greek philosophers with the doctrines of Christ" -- to explore grand, universal themes, all of them centered on its protagonist, the school's founding father, Francis Prescott. It is, I now realize, a minor masterpiece of 20th-century literature.
AP obituary by Hillel Italie
He wrote more than 50 books, averaging about one a year after the end of World War II, and crafted such accomplished works as the novel "The Rector of Justin" and the memoir "A Writer's Capital," not to mention biographies, literary criticism and short stories. He was a four-time fiction finalist for the National Book Award, his nominated novels including "The Embezzler" and "The House of Five Talents."
"I'm rather inclined to be edgy when I'm not writing," Auchincloss said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. "In (a) ... book on Jack Kennedy, it says he told (British) Prime Minister (Harold) Macmillan that if he didn't have a girl every three days he'd get headaches. I thought that was rather extreme, but writing is little bit like that for me."
Auchincloss lived up to the old world ideal of being "useful," bearing the various titles of writer, attorney, community leader and family man. He was a partner at the Wall Street firm of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood and the father of three. He served as president of both the Museum of the City of New York and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Last of His Kind by Kevin Mims
In many ways Louis Auchincloss was more like a 19th century man of letters than a 20th century one. He didn’t publish a big self-important mega-tome every ten years that attempted to reinvent the art of fiction a la Pynchon or DeLillo. Instead he reliably produced a new book (sometimes two) in just about every year of his literary career. His first book was published in 1947. His latest was published in 2008. Like Jane Austen he focused on the foibles and frailties of the small segment of society on which he was an expert. He tilled a small patch of literary ground but from it he brought forth nourishing and abundant fruit.
New York Times obituary by Holcomb B. Noble,
Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
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Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “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,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”
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The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”
“These days,” he added, “the general public, though fascinated by the superficial trappings of privilege, seems to have little interest in the deeper truths with which Mr. Auchincloss is passionately concerned — with, that is, the beliefs, principles, hypocrisies, prejudices and assorted strengths and defects of character that typify the American WASP civilization that produced what was for a long time the country’s undisputed ruling class.”
“Class prejudice” was Mr. Auchincloss’s response to his critics. “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice,” he said in an interview in 1997, “and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”
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He dropped out of Yale before his senior year and entered the University of Virginia law school. To his surprise he found he liked the law, particularly estates law, and in 1941, after earning a law degree, he joined the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When World War II began Mr. Auchincloss enlisted in the Navy. He served in Naval intelligence, then commanded a craft that shuttled troops and the wounded across the English Channel during the Normandy invasion.
He also was the recipient of the 2005 Medal of Arts.
