White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

In the last twenty years, a new style in inspirational literature, relevant to a new style of aspiration, has risen in the United States. This literature does not provide its large readership with techniques for cultivating the old middle-class virtues, nor the techniques for selling oneself, although, like other inspirational material, it is concerned with the individual rather than society. It emphasizes peace of mind and various physical and spiritual ways of relaxation, rather than internal frenzy in the service of external and known ambitions. As a literature of resignation, it strives to control goals and ways of life by lowering the level of ambition, and by replacing the older goals with more satisfying internal goals.

This is accomplished, negatively, by tarnishing the old images of success. In The Hucksters, The Gilded Hearse, Death of a Salesman, The Big Wheel, the externally successful are portrayed as internal failures, as obnoxious, guilt-ridden, ulcerated people of uneasy conscience, at war with all the peaceful virtues of the old life and, above all, miserably at war with their tormented selves. ‘I tried to tell myself to snap out of it,' says a James M. Cain hero, in The Moth, ‘that I had everything I had ever wanted, a dream job, big dough, the respect of the business I was in. I had a car, a Packard that just floated. I had an apartment looking right over the ocean. I had a woman with every kind of looks there was. And yet, if it was what I had been thirsty for, it never came clear, really to quench thirst, but had bubbles in it, like... champagne. I felt like life was nothing but one long string of Christmas afternoons. I felt big and cruel and cold, a thick, heavy-shouldered bunch of whatever it takes to be success.'