America First (Fiction) (Louis Auchincloss' Skinny Island: More Tales from Manhattan) (Excerpt‪)‬

Louis Auchincloss died on Jan. 26 at age 92, having long outlived the world he chronicled. "The tragedy of American civilization is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place," he wrote. A Wall Street lawyer until 1987, Auchincloss produced 30 novels and 17 volumes of short stories. Scrawled in longhand from his Park Avenue apartment, they took place in what he called the "comfortable" world--not obscenely rich but able to send a son to Groton and Yale, to spend summers on Long Island and holidays abroad.