John P. Marquand is best remembered as a highly accomplished novelist of manners, whose ironic portraits of the foibles and burdens of the privileged classes enjoyed enormous popularity during the 1940s and 1950s. Though his critical reputation has...

John Phillips Marquand was an American novelist of manners whose works enjoyed enormous popular success. The best of his novels, such as The Late George Apley, Wickford Point, H. M. Pulham, Esquire, and Point of No Return give firm, skilled, accurate,...

WICKFORD POINT By John P. Marquand (1939) IN HIS day John P. Marquand was one of the most popular and celebrated of American novelists, but Marquand's day was a long time ago. Nobody seems to read him now except Yardleys and other superannuated white...

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past It is just about impossible for me to imagine beginning this series of essays about books of yesterday -- books I remember with affection and admiration...

Marquand was not an extensive or dedicated experimenter with the art of fiction, but a practitioner of the novel of social realism as it had been developed in the nineteenth century. He tried to represent man in his social milieu and to reveal man's character through his conduct and the choices he made in his society, rather than through the exploration of the inner self…. What he knew best when he began his career as a serious novelist was the Boston of the patrician classes, the New England ...

I confess to being an uncompromising admirer of John P. Marquand's novels. The Late George Apley, Wickford Point, and H. M. Pulham, Esquire are splendid books. The later works, from So Little Time on, contain many remarkable passages, and even the last novel, Of Women and Timothy Harrow, holds up well. I herewith make the following extravagant claims for Marquand; as a recorder of the upper-middle-class scene he is the equal of Edith Wharton; as an explorer of nostalgia, he can stand comparison with ...