SOURCE: "Postlapsarians: Louis Auchincloss's The Winthrop Covenant," in The Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1988, pp. 38-45.

In the following essay, O'Sullivan analyzes biblical allusions in The Winthrop Covenant. The critic notes that the collection initially compares America to an idyllic Garden of Eden, but eventually develops a more complex view wherein characters must deal with an imperfect land and their own sense of mission.

In The Winthrop Covenant, his collection of stories examining the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic in New York and New England, Louis Auchincloss examines the movement from public to private redemption in the world of the privileged. Although Auchincloss, almost inevitably, begins by introducing imagery that reflects the traditional view of the American as a prelapsarian Adam and his country as a fresh Eden, he goes beyond these images in his nine stories to bring the tale nearer completion...