John P. Marquand (1893–1960)

John P. Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his brilliant work of social satire, *The Late George Apley*. Through the life of its title character, George Apley, the book provides a complex and frequently humorous look into the inflexible world of Boston Brahmin society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The novel's unique narrative structure is one of its most notable features. After George Apley passed away, a rather haughty and well-meaning family friend named Horatio show more Willing put together what is presented as a fictional biography. Using a variety of letters, diaries, and other private records, it seeks to paint a respectable and admiring picture of Apley. Willing's well-meaning but frequently misguided remarks are masterfully used by Marquand to subtly expose a more nuanced and occasionally tragic reality beneath the surface. The very limitations and setbacks of Apley's life are frequently brought to light by Willing's attempts to cleanse or justify Apley's early defiances or moments of true emotion. This semi-epistolary approach allows for layers of irony and subtle critique.

Marquand's genius lies in his ability to be both gently satirical and deeply sympathetic towards his characters. While he pokes fun at the pretensions and absurdities of Boston's elite, he also allows the reader to feel a profound sense of understanding and even pity for George Apley. Apley is not a villain but rather a man trapped by the very circumstances of his birth and the rigid expectations he inherited.

The Late George Apley is a witty, incisive, and ultimately poignant character study. It offers a fascinating glimpse into a specific time and place while also exploring universal themes of identity, legacy, and the complex interplay between individual desires and societal pressures. It remains a relevant and highly regarded work of American literature for its sharp observations and its blend of humor and pathos. show less

A thumping good read. I felt like I was reading a combination of "The Great Gatsby" and Downton Abbey and Anthony Trollope.
I hadn't read John Marquand before, hadn't even heard of him; now, I want everything he's written. I bought this book from the dollar cart at a used-books shop, probably based on its cover and maybe after reading the opening lines and bits from pages farther in.
I couldn't have gotten luckier.
There are irritatingly self-centered characters and eccentric stately characters show more and an honest open-eyed narrator who knows that it would be best if all these lackadaisical young adults, including him, left Wickford Point to establish lives of their own. Some do - for a while - but they end up being drawn back to Wickford Point - there's nothing they can do about it, it seems.
Good humor, good writing, good story, and thought-provoking slices of life. What more could you want from a novel?
I lucked into a gem. show less

Life at Happy Knoll is an understated satire by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist I suspect few readers bother reading today. Though in his day, around the time he won the 1938 Pulitzer for The Late George Apley, he was commercially successful and critically well received. So it's a minor shame that, not dusting off the cobwebs of a forgotten novel by John P. Marquand every now and then, in order to enjoy his mid-century skewering of double-talking high society WASPs. Of folks fixated on show more protecting their precious domestic insularity and supremely shallow social values—common themes in Marquand's novels and especially Life at Happy Knoll—that made his primarily WASP audience perhaps chuckle and gasp simultaneously in discomfiting recognition of itself.

Happy Knoll and Hard Hollow country clubs are in a constant letter writing battle (that's all the novel is -- the correspondence of rival boards of governors pandering to potential new members to join their country club instead of that other one) as they compete for new residents recently relocated into their Revolutionary Road-like community. Where Richard Yates rarely strayed in his strict adherence to bleak realism, Marquand routinely ventured mildly over the top in his less stringent realism. Cadillac owners, for instance, are de rigueur in Happy Knoll and Hard Hollow, though less prestigious car owners are tolerated even as they're privately derided to whatever degree their set of wheels happens to correspond to whatever lower notch on some agreed upon and yet arbitrary country club continuum that measures the virtue most important to them -- status.

Marquand gleefully showed us how his country-clubbers would, of course, and regardless of a member's real or, more importantly, perceived status, never think of bad-mouthing a member for owning a lower class of automobile than their Daddy's Caddy, because that's just not -- obviously meaning it most assuredly is -- how Happy Knoll or Hard Hollowites behave socially. Right! Marquand mocked them, gifted and deft as he was conveying their subtle double-speak, double standards and overarching snootiness. Marquand's country club masses are too deluded by their own hypocrisy and masks to remember they're all merely average achievers at best, no matter their golf handicaps, and in no position whatsoever to be judging anybody within or without the narrow-minded strictures of what amounts to their stunted development, these supposed adults stuck in their extended adolescences decades removed from their proms, rehashing the petty jealousies and insecurities of their high school cliques.

Life at Happy Knoll was Mad Men-hooks-up-with-Desperate Housewives half-a-century before either iconic Stateside television show aired, only the novel's not as serious as the former or as funny as the latter. Mildly amusing, never savage or too outrageous, this semi-serious, mostly lightweight (but not inane) satire of Marquand's, remains a relevant class commentary of 1950s Americana. And while Marquand's novels have fallen out of fashion, the contemptible country club hubris he chronicled endures. Or rather it has, in fact, become more pervasive in this now mediocre yet entitled "culture" of ours that's become as much the Happy United Knolls or Hard United Hollows as the 21st century United States....

Marquand first published Life at Happy Knoll near the end of his career in recurring installments (1955-1957) for Sports Illustrated. The magazine's golf aficionados made the series a success, and soon Marquand's publisher cashed in on the country club craze, releasing the complete series as a short epistolary novel the summer of 1957.

(Good intro to the novels of John P. Marquand) show less

This is an interesting time to be reading [Thank You, Mr. Moto]. It is clear that [[John Marquand]] admires much about both Chinese and Japanese culture and manners, and is critical of the ex-pat community. He supplies much more historical and cultural information, however filtered through his outsider perspective, than is normally present in thrillers of this era and for a long time to come. It seems to me that Marquand, writing in the 1930s, is doing his best to bring an unprejudiced eye show more to the people and cultures that his American protagonist both loves and has an incomplete understanding of, that he is encouraging us to question _our_ prejudices. This isn’t completely surprising, coming as he did from a situation where he faced prejudice because of his family’s fall from wealth, and having several aunts who actively worked for abolition. And yet he is so steeped in his culture's racism that he can’t see it when he is perpetuating it himself.

I think this would be a useful tool for people from our dominant cultures today to read. We have learned so much about racism in the eighty-odd years since it was written. We feel pretty Woke. Yet we still are blinkered around so many of our own assumptions. To look at our counterpart from another time makes that disjunct more apparent. show less