Books, Arts & Manners: Blue-Bloods, Blah Blah Blah

The Atonement and Other Stories, by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $24)

WITH the possible exception of William S. Burroughs, no twentieth-century American writer has received as much undeserved praise as Louis Auchincloss. Years ago, Gore Vidal, who is Auchincloss’s cousin, wrote an essay in which he claimed that Auchincloss had been denied the prizes he deserves because the New York literary scene had been taken over by a modernist Jewish cabal. Not having read any Auchincloss when I read Vidal’s essay, I did not dismiss this argument as quickly as I should have done.

JF

About the Author

Jonathan Foreman

Mr. Foreman, a writer at large for Standpoint magazine, is based in London and New Delhi.

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The Atonement and Other Stories, by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $24)

WITH the possible exception of William S. Burroughs, no twentieth-century American writer has received as much undeserved praise as Louis Auchincloss. Years ago, Gore Vidal, who is Auchincloss’s cousin, wrote an essay in which he claimed that Auchincloss had been denied the prizes he deserves because the New York literary scene had been taken over by a modernist Jewish cabal. Not having read any Auchincloss when I read Vidal’s essay, I did not dismiss this argument as quickly as I should have done.