The Late George Apley | Literary Precedents

The Late George Apley Literary Precedents

The Late George Apley is most often linked with George Santayana's The Last Puritan, subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1935), a phrase that reverses Marquand's subtitle, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. Most critics believe Marquand writes in the American tradition that includes Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, and Sinclair Lewis, but the satirical force of Marquand's novels calls forth comparisons to Austen, Thackeray, and Trollope, the most "eighteenth-century" of the nineteenth-century British novelists, rather than to the less self-consciously satirical Americans.