Word: auchincloss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Louis Auchincloss...
...Louis Auchincloss, discreet attorney to the well-to-do and subtle novelist of their mores, proposes that the period between 1880 and 1910 could be called the Vanderbilt Era, after its largest and wealthiest clan. In these portraits in miniature of family members -- plus outriders like Richard Morris Hunt, who designed their grandiose homes -- Auchincloss writes with the relaxed intimacy of a frequent houseguest. (In fact, his wife Adele is a Vanderbilt descendant...
...belonging seems to gentle his judgments. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the builder of his family's fortune (and of the New York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness may have been caused...
...Auchincloss tosses off small but fascinating insights into the life-styles of the rich and infamous. Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the longtime doyenne of Manhattan society, had elaborate dinners for 40 guests served at near Burger King pace: eight courses in an hour. Despite their snobbishness and excess, Auchincloss notes, the Vanderbilts did live up to a code. They were true to their own, and, as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney indicated during the 1930s custody case involving her niece Gloria, they knew the difference between a lady and a tramp -- which is that the lady must conceal the tramp inside...
...Auchincloss's characters must struggle with this problem, one so hopelessly old-fashioned as to seem brand new. His graceful, straightforward narratives, so conventional in form, convey a rare impression: people behaving as if their actions meant something beyond the swamp of ego and the self...