The Mad Men Book Club

Despite the booze, clothes, and mid-afternoon romps, knowledge on Mad Men isn’t exclusively carnal. Around the curves of the show’s hedonism is a different kind of sensibility, a more high-minded one: Colleagues burn when copywriter Ken Cosgrove lands a story in The Atlantic (“Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning”); Don Draper stumbles through New York, puzzling over Frank O’Hara’s 1957 Meditations in an Emergency.

Of course, this is Madison Avenue we’re talking about. Don’s reading tends to be as much about enrichment as enlightenment. If the ad man wants to know What Women Want, he picks up Rona Jaffe’s 1958 The Best of Everything. Faced with a similarly challenging conundrum, selling tourism to Israel (What Jews Want), he grabs Leon Uris’  Exodus.

As the third season of the AMC show premieres Sunday, The Daily Beast offers some advice on how to read like a Mad Man:

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
by Sloan Wilson (1955).

Gregory Peck starred in the film version released one year later. Comedian Jimmy Barrett piques Don by nicknaming him “the man in the gray flannel suit.”

The Organization Man
by William H. Whyte, Jr. (1956).

The Black Swan of its day, Whyte’s book became the standard text on the workplace and its impact on American society. A writer at Fortune, Whyte profiled the same corporate heads that Sterling Cooper, the advertising firm of Mad Men, try to woo.

Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand (1957).

The eccentric co-owner of Sterling Cooper, Bert Cooper, is an admirer of the philosopher and author Rand. Her Atlas Shrugged profiles the terror of government control; its emphasis on individualism and free markets has made it a popular text once again in these days. Among noteworthy acolytes was former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Meditations on an Emergency
by Frank O’Hara (1957).

With Greenwich Village seen as some exotic land for the men of Sterling Cooper, avant-garde culture is generally treated with disdain or confusion. Apparently, there’s some guy name Bob Dylan singing down there. They also smoke pot. The show tries to bridge the gap between the two places with Don’s embrace of Frank O’Hara’s poetry.

The Best of Everything
by Rona Jaffe (1958).

Jaffe was the Candace Bushnell of the Atomic Age, painting a picture of the life of single working women in New York City. Don reads this one in bed next to his wife Betty.

Exodus
by Leon Uris (1958).

When the Israeli Department of Tourism comes knocking, Don checks out this work of historical fiction about the founding of the State of Israel. Of course, he hopes it will also provide insight into the state of a Jewish woman he’s pursuing. The book’s popularity increased in 1960 with the release of a film version, staring Paul Newman as the protagonist Ari Ben Canaan.

Ourselves to Know
by John O’Hara (1960).

Without John O’Hara, you’d never have the later Johns who came to define suburbia and status in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: Updike and Cheever. In 1960, O’Hara’s Ourselves to Know rose to the top of bestseller list.

The Agony and the Ecstasy
by Irving Stone (1961).

Peggy Olson’s mom, the devout Catholic, reads this early '60s bestseller about painter Michelangelo Buonarroti, who took the Holy Father’s city by storm in 1496.

Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates (1961).

A young married couple moves into a Connecticut bedroom town with a son and daughter in 1955 and then their lives fall apart. Sound familiar? Of course, the story is probably most familiar for moviegoers who saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet take star turns in the story last year. Show creator Matthew Weiner told The New York Times recently, “ Revolutionary Road was given to me three years after I wrote the pilot.” He said if he had read the book, he probably wouldn’t have tried to write the show. “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about.”

Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter (1962).

With her marriage on the rocks, Betty starts reading this novel satirizing Nazism. On the publication of Porter's letter, The New York Times observed, “In no time the book was one of those frequent hapless phenomena—the novel that sells like hot cakes but is soon abandoned as unreadable.” Hot and unreadable—a perfect choice for Betty Draper.

Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger (1961)

The allure of publishing a short story, which drives Pete Campbell, is certainly fueled by the prestige of writers like J.D. Salinger. These two novellas were first published separately in The New Yorker in the 1950s but came together as a bestseller for Little Brown in 1961, Mad Men Season 1.

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath (1963).

At least one long shot of the isolated Betty Draper and her stare into the kitchen oven had The Daily Beast thinking of the fate of early '60s feminist author Sylvia Plath. The heroine of Plath’s novel, Esther, may be more like Peggy Olson, the striving copywriter at Sterling Cooper, than the stay-at-home mom Betty. Published under a pseudonym in England a month before Plath’s suicide, The Bell Jar didn’t see American publication until 1971.

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Samuel P. Jacobs is a staff reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and The New Republic Online.