SOURCE: A review of The Winthrop Covenant, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 237, No. 4, April, 1976, p. 112.

In the following review of The Winthrop Covenant, Todd comments on the moral situations Auchincloss presents and the author's focus on Puritan values and behavior.

Wonderful money. It is such interesting stuff, and yet current fiction pays so little attention to it. American novelists love to talk about money, as everyone who has seen two of them together has noticed. But these days they don't write about it very often or very well. I can think of just one contemporary American writer who has made a career of observing wealth: Louis Auchincloss. . . .

He has slowly attracted a sizable audience, though he has few friends in the critical Establishment. Perhaps the warmest praise he has received came from his distinguished distant cousin Gore Vidal, in an essay in The New York Review of Books...