Abstract
The House of Five Talents, published in September 1960, is a novel in the form of a family memoir. It is written by Augusta — ‘Gussie’ — Milliner, a granddaughter of the business tycoon Julius Millinder, a German-Jewish immigrant who upon his death in 1886 left behind a fortune of around $100 million. Julius Millinder’s death forms the starting-point of Gussie’s memoir. She is not concerned with the tycoon himself and the making of his fortune: his biography has already been written by another member of the family. Instead, her concern is with his descendants, with their inheritance of the Millinder fortune, and with the social and psychological destiny that results from the possession of that money.
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Notes
Auchincloss, The House of Five Talents (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) p. 3.
For a discussion of this aspect, see Christopher C. Dahl, Louis Auchincloss, Literature and Life Series, American Writers (New York: Ungar, 1986) pp. 68–9.
See Iola Haverstick, ‘The Author’, Saturday Review, XLV (14 July 1962) 21.
Auchincloss, Portrait in Brownstone (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1962) p. 7.
Cf. ‘Edith Wharton’, in Auchincloss, Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965) pp. 42–5
and Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in her Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1971) pp. 128–39.
Cf. Vincent Piket, ‘An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, Dutch Quarterly Review, XVIII, no. 1 (1988) 23.
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© 1991 Vincent Piket
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Piket, V. (1991). Public and Private Discourses, 1960–3. In: Louis Auchincloss. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_6
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