ABSTRACT
Not long after Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, Jacqueline Susann went on the Johnny Carson show. Susann, we remember, had become famous for her pulp novel Valley of the Dolls, which triangulated, in what seemed an all-American way, ambition, sex and barbiturates. Everybody was a “user” in more ways than one. By 1969, the year Portnoy’s Complaint was published, the paperback version of Valley of the Dolls had been as inescapable in the supermarket as the Coca Cola trademark.
