The Sanctimonious Suburbanite: Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture

“…In series 2 of Mad Men the be-suited central character Don Draper attracts the disparaging epithet from a foe in the hippie commune he starts to frequent of 'hey, it's the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit' , suggesting that like the book he too epitomizes the 'straight' suburban mindset unlike the bohemian name-caller. Indeed the book has inspired numerous subsequent academic works spanning articles (Jurca 1999), and analyses which see it as symbolizing the triumph of big corporations (Spector 2008;Panayiotou 2012) including the book Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture (Castronovo 2004).…”