Word: businessman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...John Dos Passos' The Big Money, that show businessmen at their materialistic worst. Yet for all the angry talk of flint-hearted, fatheaded bosses, there is a big difference in Company Man that is symptomatic of the spate of new novels rediscovering the American business scene. A businessman himself (onetime ad manager for Braniff Airlines), Author Burnett has tried to analyze and report how a big U.S. business works in modern-day society...
...weight of evidence is that U.S. authors have indeed changed their approach to the businessman, and that their novels reflect the changing times. Author-Critic John Chamberlain, who eight years ago wrote in FORTUNE that novelists "are not only antibusiness; they are also anti-fecundity and anti-life," now feels that "the businessman has been made much more human...
...still a lack of real understanding of what goes on behind company doors. All too often their characters are stereotyped portraits grafted onto a business setting, characters closer to Freud than the factory. Even John P. Marquand argues Harvard Professor Lynn, in Marquand's novel about a businessman, Sincerely, Willis Wayde, has much of the action take place offstage in suburban drawing rooms, thus making it more a novel of manners than of business. Says Lynn: "Like so many writers, Marquand knows society well and the business world not at all." At the same time, concedes Lynn...
More and more authors are aware that the businessman is not a duck-billed oddity from another world, but a human being inhabiting the same society as everyone else. The great problem is getting him on paper-and in modern dress, recognizing that business has changed from the freebooting days of the tycoon. What fiction now needs, suggests Chase Manhattan Bank Economist Robert A. Kavesh in a survey of current business fiction, is a "greater focus on the corporation itself and more particularly on the executives who govern collectively. No longer the villain of the piece, the businessman may appear...
...Pagliacci of the novelty business grimaces and clowns his way through a party while his firm takes the long slide into bankruptcy. The finance company has his Cadillac; creditors are massing like enemy battalions; the money men don't answer their phones when he calls-and the harried businessman responds like a hermit in the grip of a mystical experience: "He saw it all. He couldn't stop talking. He would get his backing, he would recoup, he would be a power in the industry again. Everyone would smile. He would be popular, universally admired. His visions soared...