Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent New York family who became a widely read author of dozens of books that plumbed the world of Manhattans old-money elite, died Tuesday night in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Auchincloss lived in Manhattan.
Although he also wrote distinguished short stories, criticism and social history, Mr. Auchincloss (pronounced AW-kin-kloss) was mainly regarded as one of Americas pre-eminent novelists of manners and a portraitist of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper crust.
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, Gore Vidal once wrote. 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 writers debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class.
A full obituary is here.
A link to an interview with Louis Auchincloss from 1956 can be found here. For collectible books by Louis Auchincloss search Books Tell You Why.
Source: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/louis-auchincloss-chronicler-of-the-upper-crust-has-died/
