Louis Auchincloss

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (1917-2010) was an upper-class American novelist, and to minor extent, a poet. His works include Portrait in Brownstone (1962), The Winthrop Covenant (1976), Life, Law, and Letters (1979), and Diary of a Yuppie (1987).

Life and works

Auchincloss was born September 27, 1917, to a family that was wealthy by most standards, but not by Wall Street's, though he still attended Yale from 1935 to 1939. He sent his first novel to publisher while a senior at Yale, and upon its rejection, gave up hopes of becoming a writer and decided to focus on his legal career, studying at Virginia Law School. However, his law career did not keep him from writing, and he published his first novel, The Indifferent Children, under a pseudonym in 1947.

He became well-known for his multi-generational stories A Portrait in Brownstone, (The House of) Five Talents, East Side Story, and his finest novel, The Rector of Justin (1964), the tale of a school headmaster dealing with the sixties. Books like The Rector of Justin and Diary of a Yuppie focused on a single character in great detail, while others, such as Tales of Manhattan (1967) and Skinny Island (1987) contain events linked by a common setting - regardless, nearly all of his novels concern the moral dilemmas of the upper class. After a long career in law, he retired in 1987, and died on January 26, 2010.

See Also

• Edith Wharton
• Henry James