Novelist
Wilson wrote fifteen books, including the bestsellers The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and A Summer Place (1958), both of which were adapted into feature films. In his next novel, A Sense of Values, protagonist Nathan Bond was a disenchanted cartoonist caught up in adultery and alcoholism; it was not well received. In Georgie Winthrop, an over-the-hill 45-year-old college vice president takes up with the bohemian 17-year-old daughter of his childhood love. The novel The Ice Brothers is loosely based on Wilson's experiences in Greenland while serving in the US Coast Guard. The memoir What Shall We Wear to This Party? recalls his experiences in the Coast Guard during World War II and the changes to his life after the bestseller Gray Flannel was published.
Wilson was an advocate for integrating, funding and improving public schools. He became Assistant Director of the National Citizens Commission for Public Schools as well as Assistant Director of the 1955-56 White House Conference on Education.
Read more about this topic: Sloan Wilson
Famous quotes containing the word novelist:
“The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)