![]() ![]() But in other ways “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is utterly dated. ![]() Gregory Peck played Tom Rath in the Hollywood version, and today, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, many of the themes the novel addresses seem strikingly contemporary. “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” is about a public-relations specialist who lives in the suburbs, works for a media company in midtown, and worries about money, job security, and educating his children. “Somewhere around nine-thirty in the evening, Martinis and Manhattans would give way to highballs, but the formality of eating anything but hors d’oeuvres in-between had been entirely omitted.” ![]() “On Greentree Avenue cocktail parties started at seven-thirty, when the men came home from New York, and they usually continued without any dinner until three or four o’clock in the morning,” Wilson writes of the tidy neighborhood in Westport where Rath and countless other young, middle-class families live. She comes back with a glass half full of ice and gin. Then his wife wakes him up in the middle of the night, wanting to talk. ![]() Once, Rath takes a tumbler of Martinis to bed, and after finishing it drifts off to sleep. On Sunday mornings, Rath and his wife lie around drinking Martinis. If he misses the train, he’ll duck into the bar at Grand Central Terminal and have a highball, or perhaps a Scotch. When Tom Rath, the hero of Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” comes home to Connecticut each day from his job in Manhattan, his wife mixes him a Martini. ![]()
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