Word: authored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Status Seekers. By the rules of status seeking, it was a serious goof: no smart social climber wants to be caught showing too much interest in the book, since anyone in secure social status should be above any concern with the restless and near-universal scramble for position that Author Vance (The Hidden Persuaders) Packard undertakes to describe...
...years ago Britain's Nancy Mitford wittily divided the social scene into U (for Upper Class) and non-17. Things are not that simple in the U.S., and in Author Packard's scheme there are Real U and Semi-U, both belonging to the college-bred "Diploma Elite"; then there are the "Supporting Classes,'' in turn subdivided into Limited-Success. Working Class and Real Lower (in his definitions, Packard rarely gets much more precise than to say that the Diploma Elite consists of "the big, active, successful people who pretty much run things" ). This structure, asserts...
...examples of this struggle are frequently arresting-the builders who try to make their houses sound classy (Une maison ranch très originate), the executive who had his parents moved from an unfashionable cemetery to a posher last resting place. The trouble is that too much of what Author Packard observes is old hat, such as the upper-class preference for old hats over flashy new ones. He over-generalizes. One dubious example: Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry like to point to their past by living in Early American, white clapboard houses, while Jews prefer modern architecture, since...
...point Author Packard prints a chart of the social acceptability of various professions. Pennsylvania-born Vance Packard himself has risen in that scale. He began as a newspaperman (42nd place), but he is now considered a sociologist (27th). He lives in New Canaan, Conn., in a twelve-room house (white frame), and has a Weimaraner, just about the highest-status dog available...
Because he likes sea birds and dislikes Britain's tax strictures, Author T. H. White (The Once and Future King) lives on low-tax Alderney, a 3-sq.-mi. dot of an island in the English Channel. There he flaps about in baggy fisherman's corduroys, roams the beaches with a red setter named Jenny, and drives about in a mud-clotted, war-surplus Hillman. He gets along well with the islanders, but fumes at the excessive pace (30 m.p.h.) of Al-derney's three cabs. He seldom ventures from the island these days, but during...