If good writers are supposed to know their subjects, then Sloan Wilson '42 should have been in trouble.
His most famous book, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, topped bestseller charts in 1955. On its way to becoming a cult classic, the book transformed the gray flannel suit into a symbol of conformity for an entire generation.
But for someone who writes about it so well, Wilson doesn't seem to know much about conformity.
As a teenager, Wilson shunned prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy for an "innocent" school that moved from the Adirondacks in the spring to Florida in the winter.
Once in college, he dropped out of Harvard and joined the Coast Guard just one semester before he would have graduated. And in his thirties, he left a steady, good-paying job to launch a risky career as a novelist.
"You won't understand me unless you understand that I am an odd ball," Wilson says.
Wilson has authored 14 books. He considers his best work to be Ice Brothers, a novel about U.S. ship patrols off the coast of Greenland during World War II. But it is Gray Flannel that put him on the literary map and landed his name in Bartlett's Book of Quotations.
The semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of World War II veteran Tom Rath, a character who resembles Wilson. Rath goes to work for corporate boss Ralph Hopkins, who in turn is patterned after the late head of Time-Life publishing, Roy E. Larsen '21.
Wilson, who worked for Larsen at Time-Life, says he spent much of that time studying his boss.
"Initially, I couldn't figure out what made this man rich and powerful," says Wilson. "He was a de-sexed work machine."
After Wilson left Time-Life for the University of Buffalo in 1951, he spent two years writing Gray Flannel and trying to understand what made Larsen tick.
"I figured out in the book that he was a repressed homosexual," Wilson says.
"But then I had an attack of conscience, and I sent him a copy asking if he wanted me to change this," says Wilson. "He sent back a note saying, `Say anything about me except I changed a good book.'"
Wilson also explores the theme of war in the novel. The main character ponders why he received honor and praise for killing 17 men in the war, "The thing that impressed me about the militarywas the honor you got for killing people," saysWilson, who captained a Coast Guard Supply Shipduring the war. "I think [the soldiers] causedmore birth than death. This created even moretragedy." At Harvard, Wilson lived a very unconventionallife. He married Elise Pickhardt before finishinghis junior year, and he spent almost as much timecaptaining a schooner as he did on campus. Read more in News
