Louis Auchincloss: A Writer's Life

Author of biographies of Mary McCarthy and Henry Ford, Gelderman has produced an admiring, bland account of novelist Louis Auchincloss (b. 1917), witty observer of Manhattan's rich and powerful. Reared by a strict, overprotective mother and a sweet-natured father who suffered recurrent depressions, the future writer, we learn, developed a ``simultaneous insider-outsider view,'' a keen sense of irony that would inform his biting portrayals of upper-class greed and duplicity. Gelderman sheds a bit of light on Auchincloss's psychoanalysis, which apparently helped him emerge from his mother's autocratic influence. Studded with fresh, biographically informed literary criticism, her carefully researched narrative, which was written with Auchincloss's cooperation, follows Auchincloss from boarding school to Yale, where he was a budding novelist, to the Navy, where he was a lieutenant in WW II, and then to Wall Street, where he practiced law. Claiming that Auchincloss's best work ``is in the first rank of American literature,'' Gelderman portrays the novelist as the literary heir of Edith Wharton, recording the breakup of New York's monolithic old-money elite. Photos. (Jan.)