Mad Men: Your Definitive Reading List

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Talking about "Mad Men," the New Yorker does, particularly how its made waves in publishing circles.

From the piece in which Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America, is interviewed.

You obviously did quite a lot of research for the book. Can you talk about this process? Any exciting discoveries?

I started with a list of a hundred and twenty-six topics I was going to write about, inspired by things from the show. My plan was to write a mini-essay on each of them, and then it became eighty-six mini-essays. It’s very difficult for me to take on a writing project without feeling like I can walk around in the universe that I’m writing about. One of the things about blogging is that it’s pretty ephemeral—you want to get something up on Sunday night. Because it’s an instant medium, the challenge becomes “Find the coolest shit as fast as you can!” I’m really good at finding cool shit fast, and I already have a reservoir of this historical information in my head, so that helped. But with the book, I decided to treat it like a real book, not a blog-to-book. I spent a lot of time at the Cal Arts archive. I did a tremendous amount of historical photo research. All of the big ad heavies—Draper Daniels, George Lewis—they all wrote autobiographies and they’re all a delight to read; they’re all quippy and tell the same story over and over again, along the lines of “They said I could never make it, but I took them by the cojones and the boss said ‘I like your cojones.’ ” Over and over again, the same story.

What do you make of the show’s bookishness? And what do you think the characters will be reading this season?

I think it’s awesome in the sense that no medium is inherently better at storytelling than another; I like that nod. I think of the show as a visual novel. I don’t know what will happen this season, and I’m not sure entirely what they’re going to be reading. But look at the Cheever, Updike, and Philip Roth books that come out at that time. Well, I’m just going to tell you that little Gene Draper doesn’t have a chance: in all those books, a baby dies. I do think that in terms of the literature, if there is one strain that will cross over to the show, it will be the idea that these people have repressed their feelings, and there eventually will be a terrible consequence—say, like what you have in “Revolutionary Road.” I think it’s going to get really dark. Baby Gene is definitely marked in some way; I think we have an “Omen” on our hands.