Word: auchincloss
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...expiating missions of statesmen, clerics and professional men intrigue Auchincloss, that of moral and aesthetic critic, described by a minor character, holds for him the greatest interest...
...form until he discovered the reason for his mental block. Picking up a stack of grocery bags, he completed the necessary calculations easily in his traditional way--on rough brown paper with a pencil stub. The same psychological process may be manifest in author-lawyer Louis Auchincloss, who finds he can only write novels in longhand or familiar yellow legal pads...
...Auchincloss's legal life touches his literary work in other ways, too. Like the legal agreements he draws up during the day, his prose is dry, polished, exact. Moreover, his characters are often two-dimensional, acting unspontaneously, as if according to some imagined contract. No novel better illustrates Auchincloss's legalistic point of view than his most recent one, The Winthrop Covenant...
...title alone is enough to tip off the Auchincloss devotee that a system of quid pro quo operates in this book just as much as in the author's sixteen earlier works. But in The Winthrop Covenant the contractual terms are explicit. Examining the lives of selected Winthrops through our American history, the novel, comprised of nine short stories, considers the pact each family member strikes with the world. The quo of the covenant drawn up by Auchincloss concerns the prerogatives bestowed on every Yankee WASP family by birthright: social position, wholesome looks, refined sensibility, fair intelligence and money...
Shortly after her divorce, Nina Vidal married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy broker and the squire of Merrywood, a handsome Virginia estate. Despite the trauma that this union occasioned, it gave Vidal two tenuous family connections that were to affect his career: Auchincloss's mother was Emma Brewster Jennings, a descendant of Aaron Burr; and, after he and Vidal's mother were divorced, Auchincloss married Mrs. Janet Bouvier, the mother of the future Jacqueline Kennedy...