Chronicler of WASP Life Louis Auchincloss Dies at 92

Louis Auchincloss, who chronicled the life of powerful, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants into which he was born, died yesterday of a stroke at age 92. The Yale-educated Auchincloss left a prominent conservative New York law firm to write, and is best known for the 1960s novels The Rector of Justin and The Embezzler.

“By the time of his death, with an African American family occupying the White House and citizens of every ethnicity and creed holding positions of power all across the country, Mr. Auchincloss’s oeuvre had taken on a patina of yesteryear,” Dennis Drabelle writes for the Washington Post. “One of the pleasures of reading him is to glimpse the sometimes bewildering mores of a bygone subculture.”
(More Louis Auchincloss stories.)