The Style's the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others

With fifty books to his name, Louis Auchincloss has achieved a stature few can match as a novelist, biographer, essayist, and cultural historian. In this new collection of biographical profiles combining literary and social history, Auchincloss aims his polished and finely pointed pen at the authors who have most fascinated him over the years, from Shakespeare's contemporaries to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. These eighteen profiles, some of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review, show the critical insights of a celebrated writer best known for his fiction but equally astute in examining "The Two Marcels of Proust", peeling away longstanding misconceptions about Edith Wharton's early development as a writer, and exploring "Aestheticism and Homosexuality" in Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Auchincloss explores the creative tension between style and substance, between fiction and life. His own style is always witty, elegant, and thoroughly engaging. Not afraid to speak his mind, he never minces words, as when he writes about Tennessee Williams, "His heroes and heroines are sexual impulses, his plots a kind of sexual intercourse". The Style's the Man not only illuminates the master stylists in literature but equally demonstrates Louis Auchincloss's own wide-ranging interests, incisive intelligence, and taste cultivated over a long and distinguished career. Here he offers up a literary feast for book lovers and students alike.