Louis Auchincloss

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...

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...

Spanning three centuries, these nine stories share the conflicts of a wealthy New England family while portraying the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic.
The Winthrop Heritage begins in the stern confines of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—Governor John Winthrop's covenant with God versus Anne Hutchinson's compulsion to martyrdom. The burden of conscience falls in varying ways to the Governor's descendants. To his grandson, a judge...

How did the families who live on Manhattan's Upper East Side get to where they are today? As much a penetrating social history as it is engaging fiction, East Side Story tells of the Carnochans, a family whose Scottish forebears establish themselves in New York's textile business during the Civil War. From there they quickly move on to seize prominent positions in the country's top schools and Manhattan's elite firms. As the novel unfolds, family...

From a New York Times–bestselling author, short stories of the privileged class, spanning a century of New York history. He is our sublime master of manners, our "most astute observer of moral paradox among the affluent" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), and "one of the essential American writers" (Kirkus). Now, in his fifty-seventh book, Louis Auchincloss delivers a brilliant collection of ten new, previously unpublished, stories; once again, he unfailingly...

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...

Like Francis Prescott in The Rector of Justin, Guy Prime enjoyed the distinction of having become a legend in his lifetime. But in Guy's case, the legend is one of betrayal and infamy. For the scandal of his embezzlement brought down the delicately balanced structure of the Stock Exchange. The long-honored system of self-government by mutual trust among gentlemen came to an end with the default of one of its brightest stars. The story of Guy's fall...