The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

A collection of the author's most noted short works includes ""The Romantic Egoists,"" ""Skinny Island,"" and ""Tales of Yesteryear,"" and features the author's non-traditional style of the passage of time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

465 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Louis Stanton Auchincloss was an American novelist, historian, and essayist.

Among Auchincloss's best-known books are the multi-generational sagas The House of Five Talents, Portrait in Brownstone, and East Side Story. Other well-known novels include The Rector of Justin, the tale of a renowned headmaster of a school like Groton trying to deal with changing times, and The Embezzler, a look at white-collar crime. Auchincloss is known for his closely observed portraits of old New York and New England society.

Reviews

[Charles Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went back and forth on this one. Like many critics charge, they are a little facile and overdetermined, oftentimes with paper-thin characterizations and heavy-handed symbolism. And I'm not sure how well these stories will hold up in another fifty-sixty years.

But Auchincloss is certainly a good storyteller, and several of these are pretty entertaining. "The Stoic," "The Gemlike Flame," "The Mavericks" and "The Prince and the Pauper" were among my favorites, though I might add one or two others with more reflection. Not terrible, but not great. Probably all the Auchincloss I'll ever need to read.

[Gabriel Valjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite story in this collection is "Gemlike Flame." Young Peter Westcott is abroad in Venice, rounding off his education on the Continent as young men and women did in those days, when he calls upon his older cousin Clarence "Clarry" McClintock who is abroad as an erstwhile painter and esthete, enjoying his family money and privacy. Their meeting is interrupted by the near penniless Neddy Bane, also abroad but for different reasons: he has fled his responsibilities, which include a wife in New York. Neddy is an opportunist and talks big about being an artist. Clarence is smitten and offers to "preceptor" Neddy. Peter knows Neddy's character and watches the "affair" run its course. There is a brief interlude, both comic and painful, of dealing with Clarence's mother, who uses men to sustain her lifestyle. The mother-son exchange is caustic and pointed. All throughout the narrative the prose is meticulous and to a high standard that shows Auchincloss can tell a story in lapidary language without diluting content or lessening the demands on the reader.

"Gemlike Flame" (1953) cannot avoid invoking that other great story in Venice. Where Thomas Mann has his Gustav Aschenbach fixated on a young boy, Auchincloss shows Clarence's desperation and resignation of his impossible love with dignity, where Mann has Aschenbach write within the novella imitative Mann sentences, Auchincloss seems to incriminate himself in the confrontational conversations between Peter and Clarence with Peter as Auchincloss. An angry and heartbroken Clarry says, "You pretend to be on the side of the angels..but I wonder if you're not really the worst of all bigots." p.165.

Louis Auchincloss like John Updike wrote about WASPs, acknowledging how they, for better or worse, shaped American society and thought. He cautiously celebrates his class and does not refrain from criticizing them. While he does not apologize for them, neither does he offers up his exemplary language to say that Americans do have culture, taste, and refinement. His good manners tell him that he should not have to announce it with fanfare, but rather that discerning readers will find the gems.

[Richda Mcnutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis Auchincloss is one of my favorite authors - very controlled use of words, disciplined, elegant. He is reminiscent of Henry James, yet much more reader-friendly. This collection shows his evolution as a writer - well worth reading for that alone.