Literary Birthday – 27 September – Louis Auchincloss 

Louis Auchincloss was born on 27 September 1917 and died on 26 January 2010.

Louis Auchincloss Quotes

1. Society matters not so much. Words are everything.
2. A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.
3. Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
4. Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.
5. A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognise when he is dull.
6. Today is not forever.
7. A lot of writers … sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that’s all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere — even in prison.
8. Great lovers have made great sacrifices.
9. It’s very rare that a character comes to mind complete in himself. He needs additional traits that I often pick from actual people. One way you can cover your tracks is to change the sex.
10. Your literary style reflects your personality.

Louis Auchincloss was an American lawyer, novelist, short-story writer, critic, historian, and essayist. He wrote more than 50 books, many of them examining the psychology, relationships, and social world of America’s old-money families and upper-class New York. Auchincloss was best known for his novels of manners and multi-generational family sagas The House Of Five Talents, Portrait in Brownstone, and East Side Story. His fiction explored social class, ambition, family, power, morality, and changing American values. His novel The Rector of Justin was a finalist for the National Book Award and is considered one of his finest works. Auchincloss also published literary criticism, essays, and memoir, including The Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles and A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth, which appeared posthumously in 2010. His honours included the National Medal of Arts, awarded in 2005, and four National Book Award for Fiction finalist nominations.

Source for image: Birmingham Public Library

by Amanda Patterson
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