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Watchfires by Louis Auchincloss β€” book cover

Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss
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Overview

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I gotthe germ of this tale from an incident in the life of George Templeton Strong recorded in an unpublished section of his famous diary. I later developed it into an article which appeared in my volume of essays, Reflections of a Jacobite. My first attempt to fictionalize it was the short story "In the Beauty of the Lilies" that became a part of The Winthrop Covenant. This novel is my final development of the theme.

- Louis Auchincloss

Dexter Fairchild, lawyer and member of the New York elite, and his wife Rosalie, emerge as the central characters in a family saga spanning three generations. Their tumultuous marriage and moral struggles parallel the social and political upheaval of the Civil War era.

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Editorials

Anne Tyler

. . .elegant prose is rare enough these days to make Watchfires pleasant reading. . . .Long recognized as our most observant and perhaps our only novelist of manners, Louis Auchincloss is at his best here wryly chronicling society's attempts to gloss over vulgar reality. . . .Watchfires lacks the depth that makes a book stay on in the reader's mind, but it's nonetheless accomplished and graceful. -- The New York Times

Book Details

Published
April 20, 1982
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages
348
ISBN
9780547790534

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