Word: auchincloss
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...Louis Auchincloss...
Most American novelists are firmly rooted in the middle class, and when they write about their social betters, they are usually a little uncomfortable, like a stranger at a grand dinner who furtively watches to see which of the many forks the hostess will pick up next. Louis Auchincloss was born to that elevated society, however. He is, as reviewers always note, perhaps the only living example of the novelist of manners,, the last descendant of Henry James and Edith Wharton...
...Manhattan's Upper East Side, belong to the Knickerbocker and Colony clubs, send their sons to schools such as Groton and Yale (the author's alma maters), and consider the Rockefellers, who came into their billions less than a century ago, slightly parvenu. This time around, Auchincloss is concerned with the female of that rare and resplendent species: twelve women who met once a month, from 1908 to 1972, to enrich themselves still further by discussing a book. The narrator, Christopher Gates, is the decorator son of one of the dozen in the Book Class. He believes that...
Members of Harvard's exclusive final clubs probably experienced such elegance more frequently than non-members. But both alike say the final clubs exerted, at most, a minimal force on campus. Auchincloss, a member of the Spee, says the clubs were set off from the rest of campus life "because people who weren't in them didn't give a shit. The feeling was take them or leave them. I don't think they were hotbeds of racism of anti-Semitism. They were oases of preppiness...
...didn't understand what kind of deep emotions we had touched." Nelson now says, The president's letter ushered in "a very stormy period." Auchincloss recalls "fierce denunciation of the chaplain." Students protested, and 16 professors--including Arthur M Schlesinger '38 and John Kenneth Galbraith--expressed their objections to Pusey in a hand-delivered letter. Ultimately, Harvard's corporation reversed the church's policy...