This chapter focuses on four significant novels published in the postwar period: Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955); J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957); and Edna Ferber's Giant (1952). Analysis of the novels provides a test of how far the representation of masculinity conforms to contemporary perspectives on gender described in the Introduction. The chapter begins with Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and contemporary sociological interest in the ‘Organization’ and in the suburban family. While the ‘man in the gray flannel suit’ has become an icon of post-war American conformity, the novel opens up the complex demands on men at work in the Organization and at home in the suburbs. The other three novels represent other dimensions of male experience in the period. Jack Kerouac's On the Road represents a resurgent, mobile masculinity in the unconfined space of the ‘Road’. J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye focuses on adolescent masculinity in the urban spaces of New York, and opens up questions about the nature of modern manhood. Finally, Edna Ferber's Giant is read as a critique of traditional Texan masculinity, which was constructed in relation to the feminine and a racialised Other. In their diverse representations of masculinity, these novels serve to exemplify the complexities and anxieties associated with male identity in the period. In the novels masculinity is expressed, worried over or questioned, in a variety of circumstances.

Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Wilson's popular novel, which was turned into a major film starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in 1956, has generally been seen as fictionalising many of the aspects of corporate life and suburban culture written about by contemporary sociologists. The novel may also be read in relation to May's historical analysis, which identifies historical and cultural factors in post-war America that combined to create a ‘domestic ideology’ (May 1999: xxi). This ideology constructed egalitarian marriage and the nuclear family as the foundation of democracy, with the suburbs idealised as the space in which aspirational middle-class values and the ideology of the nuclear family could be expressed (May 1999: 65).