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. It is an epistolary novel, made up mostly of letters to and from the title character.
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.