The Rector of Justin is a 1964 psychological fiction novel by Louis Auchincloss about the headmaster (or "rector") of a socially exclusive American boarding school. Over the decades, various narrators provide contrasting perspectives on rector Francis Prescott's charismatic personality and autocratic leadership style. Through the narrators' disagreements, the novel gradually unveils that White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society—of which Prescott is a reluctant mascot—has lost its innocence and abandoned its Christian values.
The novel was a commercial hit and was warmly received by most contemporary critics. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, losing to Shirley Ann Grau's The Keeper of the House and Saul Bellow's Herzog, respectively. Its loss to Herzog marked American literary fiction's transition from realist society novels about the American upper class to poetic prose, avant-garde style, and culturally diverse protagonists.
Upon its release, Harper's Magazine called the book "almost certainly the finest work ever written about an American preparatory school". It is often considered Auchincloss' greatest novel.
Synopsis The story is told through six narrators: frame narrator Brian Aspinwall, a teacher at Massachusetts Episcopal boarding school Justin Martyr ("Justin" for short; named for the Christian figure), who is asked to write a biography of its founder Francis Prescott; and writings and interviews from five people who knew him.
Brian Aspinwall In 1939, Aspinwall begins teaching English at Justin. Prescott's contradictions fascinate him. Prescott is an intellectual, but Justin is laddish and focused on sports. Prescott's oldest friend Horace Havistock is gay, but Justin is institutionally homophobic. The school claims to be more democratic than its peers, but its students are generally rich. After the Fall of France, Havistock persuades Prescott to retire, arguing that their shared world is dying.
Horace Havistock Havistock and Prescott went to boarding school together. A Civil War orphan whose family was respectable but not especially wealthy, Prescott resents rich boys like Havistock, who become targets for his cruel wit. Even so, Havistock befriends him. Prescott dreams of building a different kind of boarding school, focused on religious and civic virtue. He has a crisis of faith at Oxford, but reconverts to Christianity after experiencing a vision of his dead father. Havistock persuades his friend Eliza to break off her engagement with the re-energized Prescott, who will always put his career over his relationships.
David Griscam The chairman of the Justin board, white-shoe lawyer David Griscam, both idolizes and dislikes Prescott. He appreciated Justin's family atmosphere, but admits that Justin's bullying and code of silence taught him to be "underhanded". Neither Griscam nor his wife share Prescott's Episcopal faith: Griscam is agnostic, while his wife, an evangelical Christian, resents Justin's religious elitism. Griscam insists on sending his two sons to Justin anyway, but neither succeeds there.
Appealing to Prescott's ambition, Griscam encourages Prescott to solicit donations from men whose wealth he resents. Prescott wants to expel a donor's son for academic dishonesty, but Max Totten, a cynical scholarship student, agrees to take the blame in exchange for a job at the donor's company. Although Max is expelled, he eventually takes over the family business and becomes one of Griscam's "most valued clients", while the son falls into alcoholism.
Cordelia Prescott Turnbull Prescott's daughter Cordelia claims that Prescott started a boys' school due to his own repressed homosexual tendencies. She marries a Catholic to annoy him, but after Prescott gives his approval, she leaves her husband and moves to Paris, where she and her lover Charley Strong (a Justinian who loses his Christian faith in World War I) become part of the Lost Generation of American expatriates. Her mother visits her in Paris and reveals a deep intelligence that was repressed at Justin. Before Strong's death, Prescott reconverts him to Christianity, infuriating Cordelia. She returns to America and marries vulgar businessman Guy Turnbull, but surprisingly, Turnbull befriends Prescott, who craves his respect as a businessman and is impressed by his shameless materialism. Cordelia divorces Turnbull. Prescott confides to Aspinwall that while he has loved his daughters inadequately, he has shown them devotion.
Charley Strong In the last surviving chapter of a manuscript that Strong burned before his death, Strong recounts his hero worship of Prescott, which may be rooted in Prescott forgiving him for an early sexual indiscretion. He sees Prescott's Christian discipline as an alternative to the rootlessness of the Lost Generation.
Jules Griscam In a memoir written before his death, David Griscam's son Jules implies that his father sent him to Justin because David worried that his materialism would spoil his children. Jules is a poor fit for Justin and Prescott eventually expels him for lying, but David gets Jules into Harvard anyway. Jules concludes that "an act of desecration" is the only real way to get back at Prescott. He vandalizes several school relics and is arrested. When Prescott visits him in jail, Jules claims that Prescott uses religion to aggrandize himself, which wounds Prescott deeply. Jules drunkenly commits suicide, taking his lover with him.
Brian Aspinwall After Prescott's successor softens religious discipline and accommodates practicing Catholics, Prescott plots to oust him. Aspinwall dislikes David Griscam's combination of materialism and tightfistedness, but tips him off anyway. Griscam persuades Prescott to relent by introducing him to elitist and racist dissidents on the Justin board, showing that his successor is the lesser of two evils. Prescott bitterly remarks that Justin is no different from any other prep school. He dies of cancer eight months later. Aspinwall resolves to finish his Prescott biography, although he implies that to preserve the idealized memory of Prescott, it will be "in some part [a] work[] of fiction".
Development
Concept
Louis Auchincloss was sent to his father's boarding school, Groton, and graduated in 1935. Although he later delivered the school's centennial address, he maintained a lifelong ambivalence for the institution, explaining that his first two years of prep school were a "festering misery" and that he was "at first abysmally wretched and later moderately content". He got the idea for The Rector of Justin from his high school English teacher, Malcolm Strachan, whose wife was the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly. Strachan had become a close confidant of Groton's founder and longtime headmaster, Endicott Peabody, and planned to write a novel showing that Peabody's "theology was subtler and more complicated than any of us supposed." After Strachan's premature death, Auchincloss resolved to write the novel his way.
In 1960, Groton published a collection of essays from the school community to commemorate its 75th anniversary. In his essay, Auchincloss wrote that the alumni had many different impressions of their high school years, and speculated that the aging Peabody had been "troubled by the number of Grotons he seemed to have created and of how little any of them resembled his own." In addition, although published by the school, the essays voiced several criticisms of Groton. Ellery Sedgwick wrote that despite Groton's high-minded rhetoric, "evil and good have entered into Groton careers in a proportion astonishingly similar to their proportion in any community".Views from the Circle, p. 25. George Biddle said that while seven of his classmates were listed in Who's Who, "nearly twice that number could, I suppose, be listed as absolute failures".Views from the Circle, p. 126. Auchincloss later sent two of his three sons to Groton, although his biographer cautioned that, by that time, it was "a far more permissive place".
Timeline Auchincloss had wanted to write a story about a boarding school headmaster for some time, although he was saving the idea "for [a] time when I should feel ready to handle it". In 1938, just three years after graduating from Groton, he drafted a novel in which a headmaster seeks to raise students "with the ideals of public service and a sense of noblesse oblige", but realizes that he has failed, as most of his students chase lucrative jobs on Wall Street.
Over time, Auchincloss decided that the story would need to cover a long span of time and that it would need to be either a biography or autobiography. He discarded the idea of an autobiography because a fictional Prescott would have trouble describing his effect on other people from his own perspective. In 1956, Auchincloss published a predecessor of the story in Harper's Magazine under the title "The Trial of Mr. M." The story details a retired boarding school headmaster who considers opposing his successor's reforms, but ultimately concedes that the school must adapt to the real world. Auchincloss recycles the imagery of the headmaster's lament—comparing himself to a vaudeville act in which a clown is "remorselessly" followed by a spotlight—for Prescott's final monologue in the novel.
In Auchincloss' first draft of the novel, David Griscam was the frame narrator instead of Brian Aspinwall, and the book emphasized the rivalry between Griscam and Prescott. He discarded the idea because Griscam's "personality got out of hand". He eventually came up with the idea of making the biographer a younger man who differed from Prescott in every way except their shared religious faith, which they both recognized was "almost totally lacking in the school, the faculty, the parents, and the trustees," who "care[d] only about the appearance of faith".
Late in his life, Auchincloss (who said that he had been sexually abused by another student in high school, without the school's knowledge) admitted that he had considered broaching the topic of sexual abuse in The Rector of Justin, but ultimately left it out. He felt that the literary mores of the day would not permit him to address the matter with sufficient candor. He subsequently touched upon this theme in The Scarlet Letters (2003) and The Headmaster's Dilemma (2007), as well as his 2010 autobiography.
Auchincloss submitted a draft of the novel to Houghton Mifflin in July 1963. It was published in July 1964.
Inspirations
The school Auchincloss sought to build a composite narrative of the American boarding school between the Gilded Age and World War II, explaining that it was "the great era of headmasters". He reviewed a series of headmaster biographies from various schools, including Peabody's Groton, St. Paul's, St. Mark's, and Lawrenceville, but dismissed them as "a dreary lot". Nonetheless, the novel frequently draws from Auchincloss' experiences at Groton in the 1930s. One critic quipped that in one scene, "the Rev. Francis Prescott, founder and first headmaster of Justin Martyr, an Episcopal school 30 miles west of Boston, was speaking about the Rev. Endicott Peabody, founder and first headmaster of Groton School, an Episcopal-oriented school 30 miles west of Boston".
The novel mirrors some of the compromises Peabody made to build Groton. According to one story, in 1891, Peabody financed Groton's main dormitory by allowing donors who contributed at least $5,000 (approximately $175,000 in 2025 dollars) to nominate one student for admission, notwithstanding the waiting list. He later remarked that focusing on educating wealthy students was "one of the great mistakes that [he] made as Headmaster". For his own part, Auchincloss commented that Peabody had no other option, since "who else in 1881 was going to support a new school started by three young men?"
The rector