Abstract
The Rector of Justin and The Embezzler continue the themes of the two preceding novels. Both of them convey a concern with historiography, and the problems of distinguishing fact from fiction, truth from myth. In both works characters resort to historiography to examine not only major events in general, but the meaning and value of their own lives. As a result, while in The House of Five Talents and Portrait of Brownstone historiography was a problematic but mild pastime, in The Rector of Justin and The Embezzler it is a more serious matter; it concerns the human condition and the nature of human endeavour. The centrality of this general question in The Rector of Justin and The Embezzler makes these novels stand out in the middle years of Auchincloss’s writing-career.
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Notes
In the novel Auchincloss’s narrator writes that, compared to Prescott, Peabody’s ‘is a simpler path’ — The Rector of Justin (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) p. 43.
Auchincloss, ‘A World of Profit’ (unpublished typescript, 1938, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) p. 215.
Auchincloss, Pursuit of the Prodigal (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) p. 10.
Auchincloss, ‘The Trial of Mr. M.’, Harper’s Magazine, CCXIII (Oct 1956) 45–52; repr. in Orville Prescott (ed.), Midcentury (New York: Pocket Library, 1958) pp. 73–89.
Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) p. 341.
Auchincloss, ‘Charley Strong’s Manuscript (1921)’, in Whit Burnett (ed.), This is my Best (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970) pp. 252–7.
See Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton (New York: Coward McCann, 1944) p. 332.
Cf. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society inthe Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
Auchincloss expressed similar views in his essay ‘A Writer’s Use of Fact in Fiction’, Probate Lawyer, X (Summer 1984) 6.
Auchincloss, The Embezzler (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) p. 146.
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© 1991 Vincent Piket
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Piket, V. (1991). Messages for Posterity, 1964–7. In: Louis Auchincloss. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_7
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