It’s the birthday of Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010), estate lawyer and novelist who wrote over 60 books about the privileged upper crust old money Manhattan world he hailed from. (Think of Auchincloss as a male Edith Wharton, only less so.)

Auchincloss was born on Long Island, New York, and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From the age of 12, he attended Groton School in Massachusetts, which was founded by somebody named Endicott Peabody (shove over, Cuthbert), and that tells you just about everything you need to know about that school except that it had compulsory cold showers. He entered Yale in 1935 (no word on the shower situation at Yale), wrote a novel that got rejected, and left Yale to go to law school at the University of Virginia. In spite of having always found his father’s law career depressing, he liked law school. He graduated in 1941 and went to work for Sullivan & Cromwell on Wall Street. During WWII he served in the Navy but returned to the same firm after the war.

Auchincloss tried his hand at writing again and in 1947 published The Indifferent Children under the pseudonym Andrew Lee. The book tells the story of a young man of privilege who grows up in Manhattan, attends Yale and the University of Virginia, and then enters the war. (Does any of this sound familiar?) It got good reviews and Auchincloss kept writing, soon under his own name. He published a number of stories which were collected in The Injustice Collectors (1950), and in 1951 he quit law to undergo psychoanalysis and write full time. But he missed the law, like you do, and within three years returned to work at another law firm on Wall Street (trusts and estates); for the rest of his career, he both practiced law and wrote prolifically.

His best novels may include The House of Five Talents (1960), Portrait in Brownstone (1962), and The Rector of Justin (1964), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was about the headmaster of a boys’ school. His 1966 novel, The Embezzler, stirred up ill feelings from the elite of Wall Street because it was a fictionalized version of the real-life case of Richard Whitney, a president of the New York Stock Exchange who went to prison for fraud. Goodreads thinks you should read it, given the similar financial events of 2008.

Auchincloss was married to Adele Burden Lawrence, descended from the Vanderbilts, and they had three children and stayed together for life because anything else would have been vulgar and low-class. (Jk.) While many claimed over the years that the world he wrote about had faded away, Auchincloss denied this in 2007 in an interview with The Financial Times: “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs—all the old clubs—are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.”

Give away some of your money on this most pleasant Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.