supergee | Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010)

As Gore Vidal said,

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. Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and book chatters from actual power that those who should be most in this writer’s debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class. Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.

He wrote a lot, and I didn't like all of it, but I loved much of it. He was essentially a short-story writer, and his best work (The Rector of Justin, The House of Five Talents, Portrait in Brownstone) was fix-ups. (Offhand, I can't think of another mimetic writer of whom that can be said.) He was a lawyer in mundane life and if, as I imagine, he constructed wills and trusts with the same intricate skill, there are many rich people indebted to him. Link