SOURCE: "Human Dimensions of Wall Street Fiction," in American Bar Association, Vol. 58, No. 2, February, 1972, pp. 175-80.

White is an author and legal scholar. In the following article, he discusses the themes of bureaucratization, class consciousness, ethics, and contemporary Wall Street legal practices as they are treated in Auchincloss's fiction.

During the past four decades much has been written on the public image of large New York City law firms. The "Wall Street" firms, as they have come to be called, have been denounced as capitalist predators, hailed as responsible intermediaries between corporations and the public, seen as bureaucratic structures in an increasingly specialized and hierarchical world and viewed as the last bastions of nineteenth century individualism. In most of these accounts, far less attention has been paid to what the Wall Street lawyer does than to what he symbolizes. Although a survey of the literature on Wall Street...