The Late George Apley

Late George Apley, The (1944), a comedy by John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman. [ Lyceum Theatre, 385 perf.] George Apley (Leo G. Carroll) is a Harvard‐educated Boston Brahmin who has lived a happy, if stolidly conventional life. But his contentment is jolted when his daughter Eleanor (Joan Chandler) falls in love with a Greenwich Village bohemian who is, horror of horrors, a Yale graduate. At the same time, George's son, John (David McKay), announces he will marry the daughter of a rich manufacturer from Worcester. Eleanor has the gumption to marry, but John goes off to Europe after his fiancée's father also objects to John's marriage plans. Twelve years later George is dead and John has become a stuffy Brahmin, thereby continuing the family tradition. Although some critics found the play formless, little more than a series of amusing, loosely related incidents, Robert Garland of the Journal‐American hailed the Max Gordon production as “an evening of sheer delight, wise, witty and enchantingly satirical.” Carroll's performance captured Brahmin stuffiness to a T, but never lost the audience's interest or affection. The comedy was based on Marquand's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name.

1st edition
(Little, Brown and Company)

The Late George Apley is a 1937 novel by John Phillips Marquand. It is a satire of Boston's upper class. The title character is a Harvard-educated WASP living on Beacon Hill in downtown Boston.

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."^[1]

In 1947, it was adapted as a feature film starring Ronald Colman.

References

1. ^ Spaulding, Martha. "Martini Age Victorian", The Atlantic, May 2004.

External links

• The Late George Apley (1947 film) at the Internet Movie Database

Awards
Preceded by Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell	Pulitzer Prize for the Novel 1938	Succeeded by The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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