For years, the name Louis Auchincloss was no more than that to me, and in fact I think it may have been tangled or conflated in my mind with that of another literary lawyer, Louis Begley—a preposterous mix-up if so, given that the one survived the Holocaust while the other sailed through Groton and Yale. Then one day I stumbled across a used copy of The Rector of Justin (a fictionalized portrait of a Groton headmaster) and bought it on a whim. Deeply impressed by the novel, I wolfed down four or five more, all out of print. How could it be, I began to ask myself, that such a skillful and addictive novelist had such a low profile? And who was he? Although not generally all that curious to encounter writers in the flesh, I make an exception for those of advanced age, particularly when they’ve closely studied or been engaged with their time; to meet such people is to touch history, to feel the full scope and rollercoaster course of the twentieth century. Auchincloss was almost ninety—who knew how much longer he’d be around. And so I mustered up my temerity and wrote him a fan letter that concluded by asking whether I might stop by to pay my respects. To my surprise, he called two days later to invite me over.

His Park Avenue apartment was just as I’d expected, elegant but lived-in, and so, mutatis mutandis, was Auchincloss himself. It’s a