John Phillips Marquand was an American novelist of manners whose works enjoyed enormous popular success. The best of his novels, such as The Late George Apley, Wickford Point, H. M. Pulham, Esquire, and Point of No Return give firm, skilled, accurate, but deeply ironic representations of the upper class and the upper-middle class.

He was born on 10 November 1893, in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of a civil engineer whose New England roots stretched back to a Norman-French family that migrated from the island of Guernsey in 1732 and settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where they prospered as privateers, shipbuilders, and sea captains. On the maternal side, Marquand was a descendant of early Massachusetts governors, as well as Margaret Fuller and Edward Everett Hale. In his early childhood the family was affluent and lived in New York City, where his father was for a while a broker. The Panic of 1907, however, impoverished...