Don DeLillo, Madison Avenue, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Fiction

Nevertheless … he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American "consumerism" discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease.

Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy"

American literature's long-standing preoccupation with Madison Avenue remains only vaguely acknowledged in American literary studies. Often subsumed within broader critiques of consumption, mass media, and the information age, advertising is a force whose hypervisibility renders it mundane. Under a hermeneutics of suspicion, the ad—which wears its motives on its sleeve—is an inadequate object of study and by extension the industry itself can be taken at face value. Advertising's ubiquity encourages the impression of a stable industry, a stability that has never existed. Under the broader umbrella of marketing—and paired with design, public relations, and the like—advertising evolved alongside the material and cultural histories of the United States, particularly that of literature. The evolution of Madison Avenue's practices, however, remain underappreciated. What studies do exist focus largely on the origins and boom years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ But World War II would mark the beginning of the end of the era of "mass" consumption: that is, a marketing model by which a single product would be broadly applicable to a faceless mass of consumers. A series of economic, cultural, and political changes would revise the standardized production strategies and consumption patterns of earlier generations. The proliferation of previously rationed goods, increasing consumer agency and group individuation, and new distribution and communication technologies yielded massive changes to Madison Avenue. These midcentury tectonic shifts were guided by changes in the principles of marketing as much as by those in finance and production, as Thomas Pynchon describes through a metonymic slide from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.²

In the 1940s and 1950s, these concerns would manifest in the popular "advertising novel" genre, speaking not only to the anxieties of a consumer culture but to advertisers' role in facilitating its advance. The genre featured former advertisers exploring the Madison Avenue experience—professional, personal, existential—through fiction. Indeed, it was a trope of the period that every adman had an unfinished novel in their desk drawer, and the advertising novel did nothing to dispel that impression. These novels reconciled the commodification of the white, male "Mad Men" through marriage plots and creative triumphs (Hermann 138). Works like Frederic Wakeman, Sr.'s The Hucksters (1946), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), John G. Schneider's The Golden Kazoo (1956), Gerald Green's The Last Angry Man (1956), and William Melvin Kelley's Dem (1967) wrestled with postwar middle-class anxiety and the advertising that constructed that imagined identity. This then-popular genre depicted a protagonist who joins an ad agency, successfully navigates its corporate structure, succumbs to its falsity, but through strength of character rejects the commercially motivated industry and parlays this act into the founding of an idyllic, principled firm rooted in aesthetics (Smulyan 124–25). These narratives often framed the problem as one of corporate monoculture and hyper-rationality set against individual expression.³

But in the 1960s, this genre disappeared as the industry evolved to construct new forms of consumer subjectivity. Madison Avenue's "Creative Revolution," which privileged artistry and cleverness over economic rationality and sales, marks the moment that advertisers turned away from the previous generation's perception of consumers as a standardized mass and toward specialized consumer niches and branded communities. The revolution subsumed creativity within...