ABSTRACT
During the first thirty years of the postwar era, the unprecedented affluence that transformed America inevitably loosed the hold of the entrepreneurial ethos on the popular imagination. Both bestselling novelists and social critics chronicle this dramatic cultural transformation. Novels published between 1945 and 1955 described a social world that, while not a tabula rasa, provided an arena well suited to the exercise of entrepreneurial drive. It was expansive, and set few limits on heroic accomplishment. It was simple - unmarred by alternative value-systems, or social, racial, ethnic, or religious complexity. Sometimes, in the absence of a cultural definition of morally significant work, novels elaborate a substitute reward system, such as sexuality, romance, or a vision of heroic manhood, tested against nature or other men. Bestselling novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s also show symptoms of cultural volatility and open-endedness, but manifested as a breakdown of imaginative rather than analytic conventions.
