10 Novels & Collections by Louis Auchincloss
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Overview: Louis Stanton Auchincloss (1917 – 2010) was an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a novelist who parlayed his experiences into books exploring the experiences and psychology of American polite society and old money. His dry, ironic works of fiction continue the tradition of Henry James and Edith Wharton. He wrote his novels initially under the name Andrew Lee, the name of an ancestor who cursed any descendant who drank or smoked.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
A World of Profit (1968) (ed. Jerry eBooks 2022)
With A World of Profit Louis Auchincloss, recognized master of characterization and social nuance, examines one of New York’s oldest families and creates a story as contemporary as this morning’s newspaper. In his new novel, the author of the best-selling Rector of Justin and, more recently, Tales of Manhattan, interweaves the fates and fortunes of the Shallcross family, for three hundred years members of New York Society, and of Jay Livingston, ne Levermore, a product of the world of profit of the 1960’s. The Shall- crosses live in uncertain affluence in their fading ancestral home on Long Island. To them it embodies the heritage to which they cling; to Jay the ground on which it stands represents the bedrock of a potential real estate fortune.
But more than business deals soon connect members of the Shallcross family and the brilliant financial entrepreneur. Young Sophie Shallcross struggles with her attraction to Jay as she fights to retain her vanishing heritage; Martin Shallcross sees in Jay the daring business acumen he lacks that might reestablish dwindling family fortunes; and glittering, social Elly is dazzled by his force and masculinity. A gamble for high stakes ends in disaster and unalterably changes the lives of all.
The record of the Shallcross family can be read in Wall Street. It can be read in the analyst’s appointment book. It is a record of love, pride, greed, infidelity, divorce, suicide, and the seductive smell of money. At its core, it is a story of men and women who move irresistibly together, then apart, yet are always contained in the inner orbit of a world of profit.
Fellow Passengers: A Novel in Portraits (1989)
This superb gallery of portraits gathers its wit and resonance from the discerning eye of the central narrator, Dan Ruggles, who in the course of unraveling the dreams, doubts, and loyalties of those around him inevitably reveals his own.
Dan spends his boyhood in the company of old-money aunts from Bar Harbor and polo-playing uncles from Argentina, stumbles upon the complexities of adulthood at Yale in the 1930s, and grows to worldly maturity at the Wall Street law firm that provides him not only with a vocation but with seemingly endless material for his fiction. Fellow passengers are the people in his life, each one a story and each one a lesson. Only Auchincloss can ferret out with such precision and understanding the secrets, foibles, and ironies that lie just beneath the proper Establishment surface. This is Louis Auchincloss at the top of his form—a book to please his many admirers and delightful introduction for new readers as well.
Last of the Old Guard (2008)
Nearing the end of his days, Adrian Suydam, half the partnership of the law firm of Suydam & Saunders, reflects on his lifelong friendship and business relationship with Ernest Saunders, a tragic and complicated man incapable of properly loving anyone. In this perceptive novel, set against the backdrop of old New York, Auchincloss exposes the temptations and vicissitudes that thrust his characters toward unforeseen fates.
Drawing on his career as a wills-and-trusts attorney, Auchincloss elegantly brings to life a stratum of society that few have seen. Through interwoven tales of family members, clients, and such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and the Astors, readers get an insider’s look at a secretive world. Touching, comical, and erudite, Last of the Old Guard is both a revealing history of a high-profile law firm and an intimate portrait of a poignant friendship between two men.
The Atonement and Other Stories (1997)
No one else writes about the moral life of America’s moneyed class with anything approaching Louis Auchincloss’s understanding, sympathy, irony, and humor. In this, his first book of short fiction since the acclaimed Collected Stories, he again brings us news that no other writer can deliver, news about how America’s great families and fortunes are run and the axes and crises on which they turn. Here is how the privileged view their privilege—some with smugness, some with style, some with a crushing sense of civic and personal responsibility. Here is how the rich marry, how they divorce, and, more important, why. Here, definitively and indelibly, is the eastern seaboard’s Wasp establishment—sometimes in its glory, more often in its decline, and always with its values, assumptions, and increasingly fragile sense of self held up for our scrutiny by a master, the most subtle critic of American manners since Edith Wharton.
The Cat and the King (1981)
A cat may look at a king, says an old proverb. The king is the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, whose fabled court at Versailles was the wonder of Europe; the cat is the watchful chronicler, Louis de Rouvroy, second duc de Saint-Simon, author of the famous Memoirs which are the definitive record of Louis’ reign.
Auchincloss has conceived his novel as an extension of the Memoirs, in which Saint-Simon reveals his own story—as well as a great deal about the private lives of the great and near-great that did not find its way into the published record. With his inimitable gift for characterization, Auchincloss portrays Saint-Simon, the meticulous, proud aristocrat of the old school who is at once fascinated and threatened by the powerful centralized monarchy Louis is building and by the king’s plot to bolster his position by marrying off his illegitimate children to princes of the blood.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (1994)
This New York Times–bestselling author’s story collection “displays consistent excellence in observing the spheres of art, law, money and society” (Publishers Weekly). Whether set in the world of Wall Street, the nineteenth-century Virginia aristocracy, or a boys’ school in New England, the short stories of Louis Auchincloss reveal a remarkable insight into the things that drive us and make us human. In this volume, the author collects a wide range of his finest work, taking us on a journey through decades of outstanding short fiction.
The Embezzler (1966)
The Embezzler, first written in 1966, uses conflicting narrative voices and viewpoints to illuminate the fabled dimensions of American economic history as it was then understood. Inspired by the documented facts of the Wall Street fraud case that led the United States government to take control of the American stock market, Auchincloss then describes the case and its main players with credibility and skill, reinventing the facts of this historical event with skill. Given the financial crisis of 2008, and similar fraudulent schemes that have been exposed since, this is must reading.
The Friend of Women and Other Stories (2007)
The mysteries of character are at the heart of these six previously unpublished pieces. In the title story, a teacher at a private girls’ school ruminates on a long career, wondering if he was right to encourage his students to find a life less constrained than the conventional one prescribed to them or if he cruelly raised unrealistic expectations. In "The Country Cousin" — a delightful one-act play — a wealthy woman’s dependent niece unwittingly serves as the vehicle that reveals her rich relatives’ self-involvement. Ranging from a boyhood friendship tested by the fabrications of the McCarthy era to an Episcopal priest tormented by an autocratic headmaster, Auchincloss’s fiction illuminates the complications that ensue when our perceptions of other people’s character — as well as our own — are upended.
The House of Five Talents (1960)
Here is the gilt-framed portrait of a family through 5 generations of love, ambition and success… Julius Millinder, schooled in the golden age of robber barons. Cyrus Millinder, who had everything money could buy–including a mistress. Augusta Millinder, whose impressive bank balance would never become a joint-checking account. Cousin Collier Millinder, who had every conceivable luxury, but not enough money to cover the sins of his past.
The House of the Prophet (1980)
Felix Leitner has been a celebrated lawyer and political commentator, an advisor to presidents, an author of influential books, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist. For decades he professed an unswerving commitment to intellectual truth. His stands weren’t always popular, but in the eyes of millions, he had the stature of an oracle.
Now he is in his eighties and confined to a nursing home, and his longtime research assistant and protégé, Roger Cutter, is determined to compile a chronicle of his mentor’s life—for complex personal reasons as well as for posterity’s sake. The House of the Prophet presents Felix from the point of view of multiple narrators, including his two ex-wives, his stepdaughter, and a former law partner.
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