After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, by Aldous Huxley, is written from the viewpoint of the character Jeremy Pordage. He is an English scholar of upper-class pedigree who as an outsider looks upon the vulgarity and ostentation of California society from an almost anthropological perspective. Hired to catalog valuable manuscripts owned by Jo Stoyte, a California millionaire, Pordage looks at the other characters from the viewpoint of an outsider, observing their antics and foibles with a mixture of compassion and intellectual curiosity. Pordage himself is a confirmed bachelor, who still, in his fifties, lives at home with his mother.

After Pordage discovers that the fifth Earl of Gonister may have unnaturally prolonged his life by eating carp entrails, he travels with Stoyte, Obispo, and Maunciple back to England to discover the 200-year-old earl still alive, although reduced to an ape-like condition. At the end of the novel, Pordage's job with Stoyte is finished, and thus he remains in England.