Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

by Sloan Wilson

  Both Allen and his pretty wife are dead now, as are so many old friends, but by some miracle, the man in the gray flannel suit himself seems to go on and on, never aging any more than my photograph on the original dust jacket does, or the image of Gregory Peck in the movie version of the book, which still appears on late, late shows. Tom Rath, the name of my hero, seems to have discovered the fountain of youth.

  The book itself has had a rather odd history. While I was writing it, I like many beginning novelists fancied that I was rivaling War and Peace. The very first reviews disabused me of this notion by calling the book rankly sentimental, but then Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review and Orville Prescott of the New York Times came to my rescue with columns which did not quite compare me to Leo Tolstoy but which said I had a good story to tell about the problems which my generation faced when we came home from World War II. To my surprise, my novel, which I had regarded as largely autobiographical, was taken by some serious thinkers as a protest against conformity and the rigors of suburban life. The novel rose up on bestseller lists and was translated into some twenty-six foreign languages. Europeans apparently considered it an accurate reflection of American life; it was banned in Russia.

  Then quite suddenly the book, or at least the title, became a sort of national joke in the United States. I remember a television skit in which Art Carney climbed out of a sewer in dirty overalls and said to Jackie Gleason, “What did you expect, the man in the gray flannel suit?” Nelson Algren, the author of the fine novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, said that if the man in the gray flannel suit married Marjorie Morningstar, he wouldn’t go to the wedding. Mad Magazine had a take out on gray flannel. The title became a catch phrase good for a big yuck when any comedian mouthed it, and people often roared in high hilarity when they said to me, “Are you the guy who wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?”

  Tailors offered to measure me for free gray flannel suits. Executives who had worn them since prep school started showing up for work in sports clothes to prove the freedom of their spirit and blue collar workers began buying gray flannel. Somehow my hero, Tom Rath, was taken to be a typical advertising man, though in the book he had worked on a charitable foundation for mental health established by the president of a big broadcasting company. Intellectuals, hippies and flower children began to consider him not a protester against conformity, but an arch example of it, the squarest guy in the world. He was attacked as a proponent of materialism, bad thinking or no thinking at all, a guy who would never go on the road with Jack Kerouac or rock around the clock with anybody; an accurate observation, because of course he wouldn’t, any more than most of the people I knew would, even though they sometimes might be sorely tempted.

  After a decade or more, the furor died down, but the book began to acquire a patina of nostalgia. Even nowadays whenever I give a speech about any of my twelve other books, people still fill the question period with inquiries about the man in the gray flannel suit, as though they were asking about a dear old friend. Sociologists and all sorts of serious thinkers keep using the title of the book in their writings to designate a certain, instantly recognizable kind of man, an American type more kindly and intelligent than a Babbitt, but still a rather limited sort of fellow. Bartlett’s Quotations lists the title as a sort of generic term.

  Sometimes highschools and colleges put The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit on lists of required reading, and I get letters from people younger than my own children who have just discovered gray flannel. To my delight, many of them seem to understand my original intentions in writing the book better than the great majority of readers who praised, laughed at or hated the novel when it first came out. The main problem which concerned Tom Rath, the usually forgotten name of the man in gray flannel, was that he felt the world was driving him to become a workaholic in order to succeed at business enough to support his family well, and this dilemma still seems current to many men and women in their twenties in 1983. Another big problem which Tom faced was whether he should try to send financial help to an illegitimate child he had fathered while overseas during his war, and some of the veterans of Korea or Viet Nam are not finding that dilemma entirely unfamiliar. Tom Rath felt that there was considerable irony in the fact that he had been highly praised for killing seventeen men during the war, but was in peril of disgrace for fathering one son, a feeling with which more people may sympathize these days than in 1955, when the book was first published. Underneath the bland exterior which the business world demanded of him, Tom Rath was of course a very angry man. When I named him “Rath” I thought I might be criticized for making this too obvous in a rather corny way, but Tom’s manners in the book were so good that very few readers picked that up. Men in gray flannel suits hide their emotions all too well, but younger readers are seeing through the disguise.

  At the end of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, I made Tom Rath feel a good deal more confident about his future than much which has happened in the twenty-eight years since now seems to justify, but in retrospect I’m glad I gave him a few momentary triumphs at least. He’d had a hard life and deserved the euphoria which so many people felt in 1955. Since having the “e” on my typewriter repaired and since buying machines which don’t need to be fixed by a friend in the middle of the night, I’ve often wondered what happened to Tom Rath after he thought all his problems had been solved. Over the years, a lot of publishers have asked me to write a sequel, and I have finally decided to try, but one thing is sure: in the sixties, seventies and eighties, Tom Rath would grow into a different kind of individual. The original man in the gray flannel suit is a portrait of youth more than of any particular era, and I was better at writing about youth in 1955 than I ever will be again. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is essentially a book about young people for young people, and I’m grateful to the publishers of this new edition for offering it to a new generation.

  —Sloan Wilson

  This afterword served as the introduction to the 1983 edition.