Louis Auchincloss is "one of the essential American writers" (Kirkus Reviews), and his fifty-seventh book, a collection of previously unpublished, exquisitely crafted stories, generously testifies to this fact. In Manhattan Monologues, Auchincloss charts a colorful New York century through a series of personal accounts from the rarefied circle that fills his best fiction. Here are characters who confidently finesse their way through society's uppermost tiers and yet are just as easily undone by the smallest upset in a day. Like all of Auchincloss's richest creations, they bump up against their consciences, with often surprising results. In "All That May Become a Man," Ambrose Vollard confronts his failure to meet the expectations of his adventurer father, a war hero. Aggie, in "The Heiress," must choose between a marriage of convenience and true love. From the old-fashioned loyalties of the early twentieth century to the complicated twists of modern mergers and acquisitions, Manhattan Monologues reveals with remarkable humanity this uncommon class "for the real people they are when all the parties and paintings are stripped away" (Chicago Tribune).