Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., Dissector of Old Money, Dies at 86

Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., an creator and journal editor who unsparingly scrutinized his fellow heirs to America’s aristocracy, primarily in “Previous Cash: The Mythology of Wealth in America,” which one reviewer referred to as “a self-help ebook for many who have an excessive amount of,” died on Tuesday at his house in North Stonington, in southeastern Connecticut. He was 86.

The trigger was problems of Parkinson’s illness, his daughter Liberty Aldrich stated.

Mr. Aldrich additionally edited “George, Being George” (2008), an oral historical past that lionized George Plimpton, a fellow patrician and literary journalist, and he wrote “Tommy Hitchcock: An American Hero” (1985), a biography of the famed polo participant.

Mr. Aldrich “was pushed by a necessity to grasp, uncover, and clarify to others the category he was born into; being a author gave him the chance to do this,” Ms. Aldrich stated in an electronic mail.

He did that the majority prominently and self-reflectively in “Previous Cash” (1988) and in a January 1979 cowl story for The Atlantic journal headlined “Preppies: The Final Higher Class?”

Whereas the article parodied prep college college students, it additionally described a “Preppie ideally suited” as “a collective craving; with respect to cash, it’s a craving for a triumph — of sophistication over earnings, of grace over works, of being over doing.”

“Gracefulness is much less a present than a typical,” Mr. Aldrich wrote, “one thing to measure as much as, a efficiency.”

He went on: “The delight of the factor comes from the information that it’s all contrived, that the impact of effortlessness requires a great deal of pressure, that negligence requires consideration, that indifference requires focus, that simplicity and naturalness require affectation. Essentially the most scrumptious ‘in’ joke of Preppiedom is the anxiousness everybody feels about being carefree.”

Reviewing the ebook in The Los Angeles Occasions, the creator Adam Hochschild wrote, “Aldrich’s voice is that of somebody in a snug leather-based armchair, telling a narrative throughout a protracted night over brandy and cigars at a sublime New York or Boston membership — a males’s membership, positively.” He referred to as the ebook “as considerate a psychological portrait of America’s aristocracy as we’ve got.”

In The New York Occasions E-book Evaluation, it was Jane O’Reilly who referred to as “Previous Cash” a “self-help ebook for many who have an excessive amount of,” including that rich folks can be delighted “to find that somebody, one among their very own, has outlined each the essence and the existential quandary of being Previous Cash.”

Mr. Aldrich wrote insightfully in regards to the drawbacks of an excessive amount of freedom, as personified by the lament of a member of a self-help group for beneficiaries of inherited fortunes referred to as the Dough Nuts, who complained, “Generally I really feel as if all the pieces I’ve finished in my life has been a passion.”

Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich Jr. was born on April 11, 1935, in Boston. His father was an architect and chairman of the Institute of Up to date Artwork in Boston. His mom was Eleanor (Tweed) Aldrich.

“I used to be entitled to a IV fairly than a Jr.,” Mr. Aldrich wrote in “Previous Cash,” however “I used to be persuaded that Roman numerals had been pretentious.”

He devoted the ebook to, amongst others, his great-grandfather Nelson W. Aldrich who after 30 years in politics — he was a Republican United States Senator from Rhode Island — turned a modest revenue from his wholesale grocery enterprise right into a $12 million fortune because of good funding recommendation and favors from pleasant robber barons.

Senator Aldrich, who was stated to have grow to be a millionaire shepherding laws for such robber barons, was thought-about the daddy of the direct federal earnings tax and the Federal Reserve System. His daughter Abigail married John D. Rockefeller Jr., the one son of the founding father of Normal Oil. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, the previous governor of New York and former vp, was a cousin.

After attending the unique St. Paul’s Faculty in New Hampshire and graduating from Harvard with a level in American historical past and literature in 1957, Nelson Jr. held a collection of jobs: reporter for The Boston Globe, New York Metropolis public-school trainer, Paris editor of The Paris Evaluation, senior editor at Harper’s Journal and editor in chief of Civilization, the Library of Congress journal.

He additionally taught at Lengthy Island College and Metropolis School of the Metropolis College of New York.

Along with his daughter Liberty, from his marriage to Anna Lou Humes, which resulted in divorce, Mr. Aldrich is survived by Ms. Humes’s daughter, Alexandra, whom he adopted; his spouse, Denise (Lovatt) Aldrich; their daughter, Arabella; a son, Alexander Goldsmith, from his relationship with a associate, Gillian Fairly Goldsmith; 4 stepchildren; and 5 grandchildren.

For all his parodies of denizens of the higher lessons, Mr. Aldrich was not above being lampooned himself. With His Crowd mourning the demise of the restaurant Elaine’s on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet in 2011 — one other class-conscious sanctuary — the poet Frederick Seidel, one among Mr. Aldrich’s former Harvard classmates, wrote:

Aldrich as soon as protested to Elaine that his invoice for the evening was too excessive.

She confirmed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he began to cry.

(Or was it eighteen?)

We had been the scene.

Now the ground has been swept clear.