Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture [Hardcover]

David Castronovo (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826416268 | ISBN-13: 978-0826416261 | Publication Date: September 1, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

This examination and celebration of the literature and thought of the 1950s throws the enduring works of a golden era into high relief. An unconventional tour of a crucial period in 20th-century culture, the present book avoids sweeping surveys and gets to the heart of major achievement. After the great renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s, American modernism seemed to be stalled, to be awaiting another burst of talent. The post–World War II period provided that new energy and genius, with book after book that broke through the ordinary realistic atmosphere of bestseller lists, and offered experimentation, arresting content, and transformation of old literary forms. In short, from the late 1940s through the JFK years, America was the home office of literary innovation. Writers forged new styles with the rapidly changing times, and generated new ideas that fit the challenges of late modernity. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit shows how particular landmark books took on the hot-button subjects of the 1950s—race and religious difference; social class and the suburbs; the youth culture; rebellion, conformity, and groupthink; the telling conflicts over taste and judgment—and how, in the process, whether we realize it or not, this body of super-charged literature shaped today’s American culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The 1950s were as important to American literature as the mid-nineteenth century and the jazz-age 1920s, Castronovo contends, producing books that so freshly "distill the modern American spirit" that they still loom large. Yet his arguments about 25 such books are concerned not with their places in any canon of great literature but with their creative responses to post-World War II America. He adduces novels and story collections by Ellison, Bellow, Malamud, and O'Connor that exemplify literary naturalism's being positively transformed by a hankering for transcendence; Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and Ginsberg's poetry collection howl as expressions of youthful rebellion; a quartet of noir thrillers portraying post-A-bomb paranoia and alienation; Algren and Mailer on the predicament of the social outsider; satires by Nabokov, Dawn Powell, and Jarrell skewering social conformities; four cultural critics essaying intellectual honesty in the face of commodification; Cheever's, Powers', Baldwin's, and Roth's fictional portrayals of WASPs, Catholics, blacks, and Jews adapting to crumbling ethnic identities; and Updike and Yates on tragedy in suburbia. Top-drawer literary-cultural cogitation. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Castronovo is an astute, blunt, and erudite critic; he is enthusiastic, not jargonistic, and manages to make many of the classic books of the 1950s--the ones most English majors know--seem relevant and fresh….In Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit, David Castronovo effectively demonstrates that to reenter the life of the 1950s, that lost and transformative decade, we must turn again to the books that prove that 'there was undoubtedly something good about a time when so many works of supurb quality could be written and published and recognized.'" --Brian Murray, Weekly Standard, Feb. 7, 2005 (Brian Murray )

“This is a fresh at a time that I now believe now demands close inquiry, of which Castronovo’s book is a fine example. He brings fifties writers seldom thought of together in rewarding juxtapositions – I m thinking of his wonderful chapter on Salinger and the Beats – and never loses sight of the cultural context. Beyond the Grey Flannel Suit is compellingly written and represents literary and cultural history at its best.” – Mary V. Dearborn, author of Mailer: a Biography

“Beyond the Grey Flannel Suit revisits moments of American literary culture in the fifties with a fresh eye, a fluent critical style, and a deep well of learning. It made me yearn, as a reader and book editor alike, for a time when our best writers managed to finesse any contradictions between high modernist intent and the task of addressing a broad and cultivated audience. His case for the fifties as a golden age is, in the end, irrefutable, and his book will send readers back to the works he discusses with a keen sense of rediscovery.” – Gerald Howard, winner of the PEN / Roger Klein Award for Book Editing

"Mr. Castronovo is a literary gentleman, which is another way of saying he possesses qualities ever more rare in our times--erudition, taste, and manners." --Gary Shapiro, New York Sun

“This is not a ‘best of’ book but rather one that considers literature as a reflection of the sea change in American society from World War II to the upheavals of the 1960s. The writing is scholarly yet accessible to the educated lay reader. Recommended.” –Library Journal, November 15, 2004 (Library Journal )

"If you couldn't find grat new fiction to read this year, there were plenty of guides to great old fiction around [including]….Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit by David Castronovo. Castronovo, a biographer of Edmund Wilson, makes the case that the fiction of the 50s was rich and diverse, capturing both the shift of focus to American youth and the suburban culture. He calls is a "third flowering of American talent." Consider the writers: Mailer, Bellow, Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Yates, Baldwin, Updike, Cheever, Roth and Nabokov. The title comes from the Sloan Wilson best seller, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," which is seldom remembered today because of its conventionality. Quote: "All of the books of our lives are confrontational in the best sense of the word. They use ideas and emotions to challenge us; they are thought-infested and obsessed with their views of the world without being ideological." --Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/14/04

“…outlines the influence of landmark mid-century books that have come to define American culture today.” –Knickerbocker, October 18, 2004

"In Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit…[Castronovo] demonstrates once again that he is one of our most graceful cultural critics. He writes with an easy confidence that makes his journey to the heart of the 50's both enlightening and engaging. His prose style has the light touch of the literary journalist, together with the breadth and discrimination of the scholar….There is a high quality of perception running throughout the entire book….Make no mistake: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit is a keenly observed and exhilarating work." --Robert Emmet Long, America Magazine, January 31, 2005 (Robert Emmet Long America: The National Catholic Weekly )

“Professor Castronovo contends in his marvelous book Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit subtitled Books from the 1950’s that Made American Culture that the fifties were a lot more than the contemporary perception.… By God, he’s right on.” –www.warrenadler.com, 3/14/05 (About Warren Adler: Mr. Adler is the world famous author of 27 novels including The War of the Roses and Random Hearts, as well as short story collections such as The Sunset Gang)

“Castronovo is strong on individual texts…Castronovo’s thesis is persuasive and provocative.” –The Antioch Review, Spring 2005

“A wide range of authors is represented.” –American Literature, June 2005 (American Literature )

"...the evaluation of the classics is judicious and very well written...[Castronovo] is fresh and interesting... Although more designed for the general reader than the specialist, the book offers a timely reminder of the enormous variety of American fiction in a period before the media set the national agenda. Above all, Castronovo made me want to reread most of them."- Judie Newman, MLR Vol. 101.4, 2006

"It is an era-defining, catchall book... it is exhilarating to read a critic so self-assured in his likes and in his studied disapprovals... We have the sweep and accessible prose style without being bogged down by an apparatus."- Steven Belletto, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 48 No. 1

(Contemporary Literature )

"David Castronovo's notable book takes on a formidable task for its relatively slim size. In a little over two hundred pages, Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit undertakes as voxed in the introduction, to survey America's literary standouts from the fifties and to explain their 'long-range value for readers in the twenty-first century.' Castronovo delivers much more than this promise...A read-through invigorates the reader to speculate and formulate critical assessments about the greatness of these and other novels, particularly about how they evoke an era and still speak to our current one. Any graduate or undergraduate would benefit from a perusal of Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit." --Studies in the Novel, Vol. 39 number 3

"Castronovo is an astute, blunt, and erudite critic; he is enthusiastic, not jargonistic, and manages to make many of the classic books of the 1950s--the ones most English majors know--seem relevant and fresh….In Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit, David Castronovo effectively demonstrates that to reenter the life of the 1950s, that lost and transformative decade, we must turn again to the books that prove that 'there was undoubtedly something good about a time when so many works of supurb quality could be written and published and recognized.'" --Brian Murray, Weekly Standard, Feb. 7, 2005 (, )

"In Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit…[Castronovo] demonstrates once again that he is one of our most graceful cultural critics. He writes with an easy confidence that makes his journey to the heart of the 50's both enlightening and engaging. His prose style has the light touch of the literary journalist, together with the breadth and discrimination of the scholar….There is a high quality of perception running throughout the entire book….Make no mistake: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit is a keenly observed and exhilarating work." --Robert Emmet Long, America Magazine, January 31, 2005 (, America: The National Catholic Weekly )

“…the evaluation of the classics is judicious and very well written…[Castronovo] is fresh and interesting… Although more designed for the general reader than the specialist, the book offers a timely reminder of the enormous variety of American fiction in a period before the media set the national agenda. Above all, Castronovo made me want to reread most of them.”- Judie Newman, MLR Vol. 101.4, 2006

“It is an era-defining, catchall book… it is exhilarating to read a critic so self-assured in his likes and in his studied disapprovals… We have the sweep and accessible prose style without being bogged down by an apparatus.”- Steven Belletto, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 48 No. 1

(, )

“David Castronovo’s notable book takes on a formidable task for its relatively slim size. In a little over two hundred pages, Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit undertakes as voxed in the introduction, to survey America’s literary standouts from the fifties and to explain their 'long-range value for readers in the twenty-first century.’ Castronovo delivers much more than this promise…A read-through invigorates the reader to speculate and formulate critical assessments about the greatness of these and other novels, particularly about how they evoke an era and still speak to our current one. Any graduate or undergraduate would benefit from a perusal of Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit.” –Studies in the Novel, Vol. 39 number 3

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Continuum; First Edition edition (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826416268
• ISBN-13: 978-0826416261
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,344,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great summary of postwar pop lit, May 22, 2006

By 

MARGOT SHEEHAN (Gotham City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture (Hardcover)

It's so nice when a scholar who can write well surveys an area of popular culture that hasn't already been analyzed to death. What David Castronovo does here is give postwar American literature the same sort of critical analysis that we are more used to seeing in books about film or drama. His casts his net wide and brings in a wide and disparate bunch, and sifts them for common themes and anxieties. You get the big familiar leviathans from Hemingway and Salinger, Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, along with the second-tier "serious" writers of the 1950s; and you also get pop names and bestellers from the era (such as the one refered to in the title). But most remarkable is a central chapter called "Angst, Inc." This covers the period's most emblematic type of fiction--that dark, pulpy stuff (Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith) which all seemed so ephemeral at the time but which later got enshrined as "noir"-ish classics. And with good reason. As Castronovo shows, this low-cult fiction, with their themes of obsessive fear and temptation, was just a purer, franker form of the same thing that the high-cult writers of the time were doing. Thus, Lolita (which Castronovo considers shortly afterwards) was basically just a glossier, more professorial version of Jim Thompson.

The book is deceptively small. It's concentrated and rich, like an exceptionally good book-review periodical. I couldn't wait to get through it, so I could go reread (or explore for the first time) the books under discussion.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars `In the landmark books, nothing is meant to be, everything challenges.', August 18, 2011

By 

J. Cameron-Smith "Expect the Unexpected" (ACT, Australia) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture (Paperback)

I picked up this book on a whim, struggled through the introduction, and then became caught in David Castronovo's choices and assessments of books. `This book is about the remarkable literary explosion that took place between the late 1940s and the Kennedy years. It looks closely at the landmark works that are breakthroughs in American literature.'
Would Americans agree that the 1950s was a particularly creative period, and the basis of the modern American spirit? Would Americans agree that American modernism stalled after the 1920s and 1930s? And those of us who are not American: how do we view the authors and books discussed?

The works discussed include Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man); Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrow); Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find) in a discussion about moving American literature beyond the borders of naturalism. The novels involved in a discussion about the consciousness of youth include J D Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye); Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Allen Ginsburg (Howl). My favourite part of the book was the discussion around thrillers, which included Cornell Woolrich (I Married a Dead Man); Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me); Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr Ripley) and David Goodis (Down There). I've not read the books included in David Castronovo's discussion about rebellion and the situation of outsiders: Nelson Algren (The Man With the Golden Arm) and Norman Mailer (Advertisements for Myself) but I am tempted.

The further I read into this book, the more interested I became. I am familiar with Vladimir Nabokov's `Lolita' but not with either Dawn Powell's `The Golden Spur' or Randall Jarrell's `Pictures from an Institution'. I am tempted, too, to read Philip Roth's `Goodbye, Columbus' and John Cheever's `The Housebreaker of Shady Hill', along with some other books discussed by David Castronovo.

I don't know enough about 20th century American culture before the 1960s, when it became particularly influential in Australian culture, to appreciate all of the points David Castronovo makes. But it isn't necessary to accept each of these points in order to appreciate that the post-World War II literature has its own energy and to want to read (or reread) the books discussed.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit, February 17, 2011

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zodqyv - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture (Paperback)

Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit is my favorite work on non-fiction. Simply the best guide for studying the culture of the 1950s and its lessons that are still relevant for today.