The Boy Inside the American Businessman: Corporate Darwinism in Twentieth-Century American Literature

This is a socio-economic study of twentieth-century American literature that reveals why mainstream businessmen must either discipline, suppress, or kill boyish tendencies that collide with do-or-die codes of the American corporate psychostructure. Contents: Competition, Expectation, and the American Corporate Psyche; Life-or-Death Dealing: Dress and Behavior Codes in American Business; Against the Fires of Ilium: Vonnegut’s Restless Engineer in Player Piano; The Catcher in the Rye: Irreconcilable Tension in Salinger’s Peter Pan; The Boy Inside the Salesman: Tired to the Death in Miller’s Death of A Salesman; Rabbit in the Showroom: Healthy, Wealthy, and No Place Left to Run; The Boy Inside Bob Slocum: The Ambiguity of Death by Asphyxiation in Heller’s Something Happened; The Boy Inside the Banker; A Concluding Interview.