SOURCE: "Lawyers at the Top: The Fiction of Louis Auchincloss," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. VII, No. 2, Winter, 1964-65, pp. 36-46.

In this excerpt, Kane compares Auchincloss's treatment of lawyers with those of other American writers.

A pat declaration of faith in mankind and the bar is among the inevitable platitudes of lawyers' public speeches, according to a Louis Auchincloss lawyer. Just as the character only amuses himself with wistful and whimsical thoughts about delivering any but the expected oration, Louis Auchincloss' fiction only hints a doubt about the Tightness of the world created and maintained by Wall Street law firms.

The cautious and correct lawyers of Auchincloss are not the hierophants that Alexis de Tocqueville once found American lawyers to be. They are practicing a well-known profession, not participating in a mystery—to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Master of occult learning, knowledgeable about securities...