Abstract
In American literature of the post-war period, Louis Auchincloss, born in 1917, ranks among the most fertile and versatile writers. Since 1947, when under the pseudonym of Andrew Lee his first novel, The Indifferent Children, came out, he has averaged a book per year, a productivity which is equalled by only few other American writers. Auchincloss’s works include novels, collections of short stories, plays, literary criticism, biographies, and history. They reflect a diversity of interests, ranging from the morality and psychology of the American middle and upper-middle classes, to American Victorianism and its twentieth-century vestiges, European history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and his literary forebears, among them Henry James, Edith Wharton, John O’Hara and John P. Marquand.
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Notes
Alfred Kazin, ‘The Writer as Sexual Show-Off: Or Making Press Agents Unnecessary’, New York, VIII, no. 23 (9 June 1975) 36.
Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) p. 676.
‘Dual Career’, New Yorker, XXVI (13 Aug 1960) 25.
R. W. B. Lewis, ‘Silver Spoons and Golden Bowls’, Book Week (Washington Post), 20 Feb 1966, p. 8.
Auchincloss, ‘A Jacobite Files a Demurrer’, Virginia Quarterly Review, XL (Winter 1964) 148.
Auchincloss (ed.) Introduction to Fables of Wit and Elegance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972) p. vii.
Auchincloss, ‘Proust’s Picture of Society’, Partisan Review, XXVII (Fall 1960) 701.
The essay was reprinted in Auchincloss, Reflections of a Jacobite (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) pp. 95–111.
A[rnold] W. E[hrlich], ‘PW Interviews: Louis Auchincloss’, Publishers’ Weekly, CCV (18 Feb 1974) 12.
Jean W. Ross, ‘An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981) p. 7; and
Auchincloss, A Writer’s Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974) p. 122.
Gore Vidal, ‘Real Class’, New York Review of Books, XXI (18 July 1974) 10.
For Granville Hicks’s statement, see ‘Louis Auchincloss’, in Hicks, with the assistance of Jack Alan Robbins, Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1970) p. 185.
In 1961 Auchincloss similarly drew the support of Leon Edel: ‘Value of a Novel’, New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1961, p. 24.
Granville Hicks, ‘Literary Horizons — a Bad Legend in his Lifetime’, Saturday Review, XLIX (5 Feb 1966) 36; repr. in Hicks and Robbins, Literary Horizons, p. 204.
Other references to Auchincloss’s technique and style as old-fashioned can be found in, for instance, William Barrett, ‘Once Affluent Society’, The Atlantic, CCX (Aug 1962) 142;
Richard Sullivan, ‘A World of Values and Standards’, Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, 26 Mar 1967, p. 5;
Richard Todd, ‘The Rich Get Rich, but they also Get Children’, The Atlantic, CCXXXVII (Apr 1976) 112.
Auchincloss, ‘Stuyvesant to Lindsay’, Book Week (Washington Post), 23 Oct 1966, p. 14.
Auchincloss, ‘Flaubert and James — Opposing Points of View’, New York Times Book Review, 24 June 1984, p. 32; and
Auchincloss, ‘Doctrinaire’ (letter to the editor), New York Times, 12 Oct 1968, sec. II, p. 8.
‘I believe that writers today (and probably always) are too conscious of literary fashions’ — Bill Kennedy, ‘Auchincloss: A “Special Author”, but …’, Albany Times-Union, 15 Jan 1967, p. H1.
Auchincloss, ‘Good Housekeeping’, New York Review of Books, XXXIII (17 July 1986) 32.
Auchincloss, ‘Swann’, New York Times, 13 Nov 1978, p. A23.
Barbara Goldsmith and Auchincloss, ‘Royal Reporters’, Interview Magazine, Dec 1980, pp. 64–6;
Dinitia Smith, ‘The Old Master and the Yuppie’, New York, XIX, no. 32 (18 Aug 1986) 30–4;
Susan Cheever, ‘The Most Underrated Writer in America’, Vanity Fair, Oct 1985, pp. 104–7, 119–20.
For instance, Tom Stevenson, ‘Louis Auchincloss: Teller of Tales out of Court’, Juris Doctor III (Nov 1973) 20–3;
David Ray Papke, ‘The Writer on Wall Street: An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, American Legal Studies Association Forum, V, no. 3 (1981) 5–12;
‘Fellow Louis S. Auchincloss Spoke at ACPC New York Luncheon’, American College of Probate Counsel Newsletter, IX (Sep 1971) 2–3;
Auchincloss, ‘The Diner Out’, Juris Doctor, III (Nov 1973) 24–8, 30.
Patricia Kane, ‘Lawyers at the Top: The Fiction of Louis Auchincloss’, Critique, VII (Winter 1964–5) 36–46.
G. Edward White, ‘Human Dimensions of Wall Street Fiction’, American Bar Association Journal, LVIII (Feb 1972) 175–80.
Wayne W. Westbrook, Wall Street in the American Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1980) pp. 182–96.
James W. Tuttleton, The Novel of Manners in America (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 1972) pp. 245–61.
Gordon Milne, The Sense of Society: A History of the American Novel of Manners (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1977) pp. 236–51.
Robie Macauley, ‘Let Me Tell You about the Rich’, Kenyon Review, XXVII (Autumn 1965) 653–5;
Leon Edel, ‘Grand Old Man — Not What He Seems to Be’, Life, LVII (17 July 1964) 11, 18;
Leo Braudy, ‘Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners’, in Daniel Hoffman (ed.), Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) pp. 84–6, 136–8.
Jackson R. Bryer, Louis Auchincloss and his Critics: A Bibliographical Record (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1977).
Christopher C. Dahl, Louis Auchincloss, Literature and Life Series, American Writers (New York: Ungar, 1986).
David B. Parsell, Louis Auchincloss, Twayne’s US Authors Series, no. 534 (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1988).
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© 1991 Vincent Piket
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Piket, V. (1991). Introduction. In: Louis Auchincloss. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_1
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