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=                       The_Late_George_Apley                        =
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                            Introduction
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'The Late George Apley' is a 1937 novel by John Phillips Marquand. It
is a satire of Boston's upper class in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The title character is a Harvard University-educated WASP
living on Beacon Hill in downtown Boston. The book is an epistolary
novel, made up mostly of letters to and from the title character. It
is subtitled "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir", because the letters
and other personal documents are quoted by another character, Apley's
biographer.

The book was acclaimed as the first "serious" work by Marquand, who
had previously been known for his Mr. Moto spy novels and other
popular fiction. It was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for
the Novel in 1938. An article in 'The New Yorker' decades later called
the book the "best-wrought fictional monument to the nation's
Protestant elite that we know of."

The narrative begins in the early 1930s. Wealthy Bostonian John Apley
engages a somewhat pompous literary man to produce a truthful book
about his recently deceased father, George. This writer, named
Willing, specializes in flowery, sanitized tributes to local
luminaries, and he is disturbed by the young man's request for
frankness, especially since George Apley was his good friend, but he
reluctantly agrees.

Willing moves chronologically through Apley's 66 years of life, using
letters from his late subject's personal papers. He frequently
interjects his own comments, declaring his admiration for Apley the
public-spirited citizen and bemoaning the disclosure of "scandalous"
information about the man and his family. Willing, a comic character
in his own right, longs for the old days in Boston, when subjects such
as love affairs, alcoholism, mental illness and crime were kept out of
the papers if they involved prominent people, and respectability was
more important than personal happiness.

The image of George Apley that emerges in the course of the novel is
alternately hilarious and poignant, and ultimately sympathetic. Apley
is revealed as a man who was deeply conflicted about his status among
Boston's elite, sometimes feeling imprisoned in his privileged world,
but sometimes passionately defending the old order.

In 1944, the novel was adapted as a Broadway play, and in 1947, it was
made into a feature film starring Ronald Colman. In 1955, 20th Century
Fox produced a TV series starring Raymond Massey and Joanne Woodward
that ran until 1957.


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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_George_Apley