The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Tom Rath commutes from Connecticut to a Manhattan public-relations job, wants more money than he earns, and carries a war he has told nobody about. Wilson’s 1955 bestseller gave the era its shorthand for corporate conformity, but the novel is less a satire of the organisation man than an honest account of one: the compromises are real, the marriage is real, and so is the private history that the flannel suit is there to cover. It anticipated by a decade the suburban disquiet that Cheever, Updike and eventually Mad Men would mine.