How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  Bibliography

  * * *

  Ailes, Roger, with Jon Kraushar. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1988. Roger Ailes is the president of Fox News Channel, and for that reason alone many of you will want to avoid this one. Which would be unfortunate, because a good political strategist is a good political strategist. Ailes has some interesting insights into how human alpha dogs assert dominance, and how first impressions reverberate far longer than you might imagine. Includes many stories that try to pinpoint Ronald Reagan’s allure to voters, and a fascinating one about visiting Charles Manson in prison.

  Aldrich, Nelson, Jr. Old Money. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

  An adult child of privilege, Nelson Aldrich wonders late in life why more Americans weren’t rioting in the streets over the fact that he —and others like him—got to lap up luxury all his life just because he was born to filthy rich parents. From his preface: “Inherited wealth puts an egregious wrinkle in the nation’s promissory claim to be a land of equal opportunity. One would have thought this might cause comment, if not outrage, but rarely in American history has there been much of either.” Also, some theories about the symbiotic relationship between Old and New Money.

  Alexander, James W. The Merchant’s Clerk Cheered and Counselled. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1856.

  Part of a series. Before this one, James W. Alexander also wrote Young Mechanics and Other Working Men and Youth in Pursuit of a Liberal Education.

  -, et al. The Man of Business: Considered in His Various Relations.

  New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1857.

  Alexander felt the need to explain what this “business man” was all about, and what his growing influence would mean for American life. (That those two words hadn’t yet been joined in the vernacular shows you how novel the concept was.)

  Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick. Edited and with an introduction by Carl

  Bode. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986. Originally published by A. K.

  Loring in 1868.

  Horatio Alger’s first big success, Ragged Dick was first serialized in a magazine called Student and Schoolmate. Alger was a peculiar man described by many as mustachioed, “elfin,” and asthmatic, who began writing after his earlier career as a minister came to an abrupt end. He’d attended Harvard Divinity School, was ordained in 1864, but asked to leave his post sixteen months later when he was accused of having “inappropriate relations” with two boys. Whatever the nature of the inappropriateness, Alger did show concerted interest in the fortunes of young boys. After Ragged Dick, he would go on to write one hundred more “boy’s adventure stories,” the bulk of which followed essentially the same plot line: Boy starts out sleeping in boxes on the street and eking out a meager living shining shoes, impresses a kindly benefactor who buys him a suit, then starts to get himself an education, saves his pennies, resists the temptations of drink and nightlife, and then through some mix of pluck, determination, and freakish good luck, gets a job that sets him on the path to the middle class. (A sampling of his titles: Andy Grant’s Pluck; Ben the Luggage Boy; A Brave Boy’s Fight for Fortune; The Errand Boy; Helping Himself; Joe the Hotel Boy; Making His Way: Frank Courtney’s Struggle Upward; Mark the Match Boy; Only an Irish Boy: Andy Burke’s Fortunes; Struggling Upward, or, Luke Larkin’s Luck; The Young Bank Messenger; The Young Musician, or, Fighting His Way; The Young Salesman; and, not least, The Young Miner.) While Alger’s name has become synonymous with rags-to-riches stories, most of his young heroes ended up not as millionaires but mere bank managers—comfortable, respectable, but hardly loaded.

  Alger was read widely by school kids in the last years of the nineteenth century but his popularity started to wane soon after that. Here’s how John G. Cawelti (see below) described Alger’s influence after the turn of the century: “Parents began to protest against what they considered the false values and unreality of the Alger stories, and a number of libraries removed his books from the shelves. They were republished less often in the second decade of the 20th century, and, after World War I, sales declined rapidly. At the centennial of Alger’s birth, in 1932, a survey of New York working children showed that less than twenty percent of the ‘juvenile proletariat’ had ever heard of Alger; only fourteen percent had read an Alger book; and, even more threatening, a ‘large number’ dismissed the theory of ‘work and win’ as ‘a lot of bunk.’” By the 1940s, another survey put the number of children who had read an Alger book at about one in one hundred.

  Amicus, C.B.C. Hints on Life: And How to Rise in Society. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845.

  See chapter 1.

  Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: The Free Press, 2004.

  Anyone frustrated with working for The Man should look up Bakan’s discussion of corporations as “externalizing machines.” The basic idea is that corporations externalize costs wherever possible, which means they let someone else pay the price for their practices. Economist Milton Friedman provided the example of a man whose white shirt gets dirty because a nearby factory hasn’t placed proper emissions filters on its smokestacks. The owner of the shirt faces higher cleaning bills, while the factory saves money by not making the necessary plant upgrades that would have prevented the shirt from getting dirty in the first place. An example closer to home might be a company not bothering to change troublesome management practices as long as someone else covers employees’ therapy bills.

  Bell, Derrick. Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2002.

  Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. New York: Grove Press, 1973.

  See the Interlude.

  Bolles, Richard N. What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers, 2005 edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005.

  The “best-selling job-hunting book in the world for more than three decades,” according to its publisher. Bolles updates it every year. Not for those who can’t take a little Christian-ese with their career counseling.

  Borden, Richard C. Public Speaking—As Listeners Like It! New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935.

  This book and others—Dale Carnegie’s, most notably—convinced me that proficiency in public speaking used to be a major preoccupation for your average American head-of-household. As more and more people have access to microphones, radio call-in shows, and public platforms, one might have expected rhetoric classes to become more, not less, popular—but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

  Brewster, Eugene V. Success Secrets. Brooklyn: The Caldron Publishing Company, (n.d.).

  Bronson, Po. What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question. New York: Random House, 2002.

  Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

  Not nearly as good as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, which you should read as a sophomore in college.

  Brown, Helen Gurley. I’m Wild Again: Snippets from My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

  As if someone rifled through Helen Gurley Brown’s desk and published whatever slips of paper they happened across. Still, more entertaining than it has any right to be.

  -. Sex and the Office. New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1964.

  See chapter 7.

  -. Sex and the Single Girl. New York: Barricade Books, 1962.

  See chapter 7.

  Bruce, Lenny. How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. New York: Playboy Enterprises, 1965.

  In this quasi memoir, Lenny Bruce serves up an interesting lesson about defending yourself and the Master Mind. (Not, to be clear, that he ever references the Master Mind.) When Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges before going on stage at New York’s Cafe Au Go Go in spring 1964, his friend Allen Ginsberg annou
nced the formation of an “Emergency Committee against the Harassment of Lenny Bruce.” Over eighty prominent personas—Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, John Updike, James Baldwin, George Plimpton, Henry Miller, Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal, Woody Allen, et al.—signed a petition in protest of the prosecution. Point is, it’s always better to have your friends do the defending for you.

  Burns, Joan Simpson. The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

  A fascinating examination of the careers of nine corporate executives, based on extensive interviews and skillfully interwoven with the author’s analysis. It includes one of the more harrowing statements I came across in all my research. After posing the question of how much anyone chooses his or her particular role in life, Burns concludes: “My impression is that people usually have more limited choices than they think they do and that it is just as well for them as adolescents not to know this: that we arrive at major turning points only once or twice in our lives and, while there, make crucial decisions blindly, not knowing what prices we will have to pay later on.” Her larger point, however, has more to do with how strong individualists can fit into, and manipulate, seemingly unmovable corporate structures.

  Bush, David V. Spunk: How to Lick Fear. Mehoopany, Pennsylvania: self-published, 1924.

  If you can possibly get your hands on this, perhaps at the nearest research library, do so. It’s a pamphlet, really short, and fascinating in content and execution.

  Bushnell, Candace. Trading Up. New York: Hyperion, 2003.

  Callahan, David. The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004.

  Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories. New York: Random House, 1958.

  It’s quite different from the film starring Audrey Hepburn. (Rumor has it Capote initially wanted Marilyn Monroe to star.) Here the outsider angle is ramped up, as Holly Golightly’s past is a little more Southern and a little more seedy. Required reading if figuring out how people reinvent themselves has you staring at the ceiling at night.

  Carnegie, Andrew. The Andrew Carnegie Reader. Edited and with an introduction by Joseph Frazier Wall. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

  Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936.

  See chapter 4.

  Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1965.

  An excellent academic (but nearly as dry as the word academic might lead you to believe) survey of early American success literature.

  Citrin, James M., and Richard A. Smith. The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction. New York: Crown Business, 2003.

  Ciulla, Joanne B. The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modem Work. New York: Times Books, 2000.

  Cohen, Steve. Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma, and Showmanship. New York: Harper Resource, 2005.

  Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Corey, Lewis. The House of Morgan: A Social Biography of the Masters of Money. New York: AMS Press, 1930.

  Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

  See chapter 9.

  Crisp, Quentin, and Donald Carroll. Doing It with Style. New York: Franklin Watts, 1981.

  de Botton, Alain. Status Anxiety. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

  Demarais, Ann, and Valerie White. First Impressions: What You Don’t Know About How Others See You. New York: Bantam Books, 2004.

  Dodd, Allen R., Jr. The Job Hunter: The Diary of a “Lost“ Year. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

  A novel about a middle-management man being forced into early retirement. Told in the first person, The Job Hunter brims with existential regret: “I can skim over the rest of my career in a few sentences and that in itself may be one clue to the way it all ended,” the protagonist muses. “We just put our heads down and started running and if you had asked us where we were heading we would have said, ‘Why, up, of course.’” Dodd also vividly describes the anxiety older men face over the younger, slicker whippersnappers (“trained in the techniques”) that their firm hires.

  Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co.,

  1900.

  One of the first American novels to paint the social and professional climber as selfish, amoral, and slutty. Although Carrie is not immoral in any kind of systematic or determined way—she’s too thoughtless. The early scenes of Carrie wandering the streets of turn-of-the-century Chicago, fresh off the train, looking for work, are the stuff of perfect costume drama.

  Dyer, Wayne W. Your Erroneous Zones. New York: Funk & Wagnalls,

  1976.

  Engel, Peter. The Over-Achievers. New York: The Dial Press, 1976.

  See chapter 8.

  Epstein, Joseph. Snobbery: The American Version. Boston and New

  York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

  Esenwein, J. Berg, and Dale Carnagey. The Art of Public Speaking.

  Springfield, Massachusetts: The Home Correspondence School, 1915.

  See chapter 4. Dale Carnegie’s first book—512 pages on how to give a speech (and live justly, ever aware of your civic responsibilities, at the same time). The book also offered a list of suggested subjects for speeches, including “Loss Is the Mother of Gain,” “Helen Keller: Optimist,” the “Blunders of Young Fogeyism,” and, intriguingly, “The Blessing of Discontent.”

  Esquire Etiquette: A Guide to Business, Sports, and Social Conduct by the

  Editors of Esquire Magazine. New York and Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin-cott Company, 1953.

  The gentlemen’s magazine takes on etiquette. An excellent introduction to office mores in the 1950s, Esquire Etiquette spills a lot of ink combating the prejudice that good manners were inherently effeminate, a matter of “delicate ladies tsk-tsking over the teacups in their Victorian bowers.” On the contrary, Esquire’s editors claimed, their book was not about pleasing sexless women but about being more effectively manly. (“[I]t tells you how things are done, by practical men who know their way around in these high-pressure days.”) The section on business manners stressed awareness of hierarchies and organization charts. They stressed that no organization was without one, regardless of how democratic and casual it might look to the outside observer, and even if the chart was “only a sometimes thing, unwritten and undeclared.”

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Basil and Josephine Stories. Edited with an introduction by Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. New York: Scribner, 1973. Read the Basil stories if you’re curious as to what Fitzgerald was like in high school. (Mostly unpopular, it turns out.)

  -. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

  -. This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.

  Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

  To give credit where credit is due: Frank’s discussion of “conformity” led me to the Delmore Schwartz article quoted in chapter 6.

  Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography & Selections from His Other Writings. New York: The Modern Library, 1944.

  Notable for its “Chart of Virtues,” with which a young Franklin rated his progress toward becoming a more highly effective person.

  Fry, Monroe. Sex Vice and Business. New York: Ballantine Books, 1959.

  Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Class System. New York: Summit Books, 1983.

  Paul Fussell claims that when he told people he was working on a book about class, most people stared at him as if he’d just said, “I am working on a book urging the beating to death
of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.” Dated in its observations, but worthwhile for its insights into ongoing American discomfort with the very subject.

  -. Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear. Boston and New York:

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

  Gardiner, William. Getting a Foothold. Chicago: William Ruth Publishing Company, 1927.

  Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959.

  An important book but not one for the faint of heart. (The text is dense, and the sentences seemingly designed to resist ready comprehension.) Erving Goffman claimed that there were some things we did for no other reason than to make a point about ourselves—a point like I’m so popular/smart/easygoing/gentle/sophisticated. One might, for example, ask the receptionist “I’m sorry, but could you tell me where the restroom is?” not because you had to go or needed to check your makeup, but because you wanted to distinguish yourself from someone who’d just say, “Where’s the toilet?” This is a dubious summary of only a small portion of the book, which is rightfully considered a classic.

  Goldman, William. Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

  See chapter 8.

  Goode, Kenneth M. How to Turn People into Gold: A Book for Every Business Man. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1929.

  See chapter 4.

  Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. New York: Random House, 1960.

  A proper screed and a good encapsulation of teen angst in midcentury U.S.A.

  Greeley, Horace. “An Address on Success in Business—for Students of Packard’s Bryant & Stratton, New York Business College.” New York: S. S. Packard, Publisher, 1867.

  Grigg, John. The American Chesterfield, or Way to Wealth, Honour, and Distinction; Being Selections from the Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son; and Extracts from the Other Eminent Authors, on the Subject of Politeness: with Alterations and Additions, Suited to the Youth of the United States; by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippin-cott & Co., 1860.