Louis Auchincloss
Author
Language
English
Description
In The Headmaster's Dilemma, Louis Auchincloss revisits the prep school world of his most famous novel. That book, The Rector of Justin, published in 1964, took the form of a fictional biography, giving the reader the full life story of a much beloved and revered, if also feared, headmaster of an exclusive New England prep school. In The Headmaster's Dilemma, we see up close what happens when a school's ideals and founding principles collide with...
Author
Language
English
Description
A New York Times–bestselling author puts a modern twist on the Nathaniel Hawthorne classic with this novel of wealthy 1950s society. The year is 1953, and the coastal village of Glenville, on the opulent north shore of Long Island, is shaken by scandal. Ambrose Vollard, the managing partner of a prestigious Wall Street law firm, gets word of an alleged affair in his family. Most astonishing, the adulterer is Rodman Jessup, Vollard's son-in-law,...
Author
Language
English
Description
With this collection of short stories, Louis Auchincloss will delight his already devoted followers and win many more into the ranks. The stories, which range from studies of family manipulation to the secrets of artistic inspiration, are in fact subtle fables that probe the heart of modern American life to examine the moral confusion that exists there.
In the title story, a wealthy muralist, and patroness of the arts succumbs to the near compulsion...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this novel by the author of Three Lives, a blue blood New York lawyer recounts his life through stories of people he has encountered along the way.
Linking three generations of a Wall Street law firm, The Education of Oscar Fairfax provides a revealing portrait of the American upper classes throughout the twentieth century. The story opens in 1908, as St. Luke's Cathedral rises stone by stone on lower Broadway, and young Oscar learns a lesson...
25) Three Lives
Author
Language
English
Description
Three Lives, more radically than any other work of the time* in English, brought the language back to life. Not the life of the peasantry or the emotions or the proletariat but life as it was lived by everybody living in the century, the average or normal life as the naturalists had seen it. Gertrude Stein in this work tried to coordinate the composition of the language with the process of consciousness, which... was to her a close reflex of the total...
26) Honorable Men
Author
Language
English
Description
A novel about a member of the Greatest Generation wrestling with moral choices over the next generation's war in Vietnam. Chip Benedict appeared to have the best of everything: wealth, education, good looks, charm, and intelligence. Shortly before entering law school, he married Alida, a pale beauty who also had the cunning and talent to become the debutante of the year, escaping the progressively threadbare world of tarnished elegance and unpaid...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this novel by the author of The Golden Calves set in 1930s high society, a young man recounts the people in his life and what he's learned from them.
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this witty historical novel by the author of Watchfires, a poor woman joins the eighteenth-century court of Queen Anne and ends a war.
On the Continent, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, is laying waste to the lowlands in a bloody combat with Louis XIV. Meanwhile at the British court, Queen Anne, aging, ill, and surrounded by sycophants, is coping with the intrigues of those who wish to promote Marlborough's dangerous ambitions. Chief among...
29) The Book Class
Author
Language
English
Description
The author of Exit Lady Masham explores the lives of twelve members of a high society ladies' book club in New York over the course of sixty years.
"If I have a bias it is in my suspicion that women are intellectually and intuitively superior to men," writes Christopher Gates, the narrator of this book. "But," he adds, "I certainly never thought they were "nicer." And I very much doubt that anyone could think so who was raised, as I was, in a society...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this novel by the author of Honorable Men, a hot-shot corporate lawyer will sacrifice anything for success in 1980s Manhattan.
Bob Service is a thirty-two-year-old crack lawyer with blood as cold and clear as a five-dollar martini. His god is power, and his morals are ever tempered by expediency. His goals far exceed an imminent partnership in a big New York law firm.
Bob's "perfect" marriage to Alice, a graceful and intelligent literary agent,...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
32) The Anniversary
Author
Language
English
Description
Crisscrossing a tumultuous century, these stories evoke lives both blessed and cursed by good fortune and reveal the quotidian conflicts of a wonderfully rich milieu. Here are vignettes that capture the loves and jealousies of marriage and friendship, recall days of a rarefied aristocracy, and hint at a new, ambitious young elite. In the title story, a tour de force of humor and emotion, a clergyman prepares a toast for his twenty-fifth wedding...
33) Watchfires
Author
Language
English
Description
The marriage of Dexter and Rosalie Fairchild-a relationship reflecting the security and privilege of their upper-class New York City lives-is disrupted by personal and political tensions arising from the Civil War.
Author
Language
English
Description
Twelve stories contemplating destiny and detailing the life of Manhattan's upper class over the course of one hundred years, from the author of Honorable Men.
It's only twelve miles long and two miles wide, but it has more money for its area, more history packed into its relatively brief settlement, and more emotional and intellectual energy coursing through its streets than any other place on earth. Manhattan is the setting for all of Louis Auchincloss's...
Author
Language
English
Description
Gaze into the lives of the twentieth-century's wealthy and declining WASP establishment in these twelve stories by the author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax.
No one else writes about the moral life of America's moneyed class with anything approaching Louis Auchincloss' 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,...
36) Empire City
Publisher
Michael Blackwood Productions
Pub. Date
1985.
Language
English
Description
This is the story of two New Yorks. Made at a time when the city was experiencing unprecedented real estate development on the one hand and unforeseen displacement of population and deterioration on the other. The film contrasts the modern metropolis with its "golden age" from 1830-1930, with the participation of some of New York's leading political and cultural figures such as David Rockefeller, Edward Koch, Joseph Papp, Norman Mailer, Jane Jacobs,...