Raised By Mad Men

The AMC TV show Mad Men was in its second season when Thomas Murray died in 2009. But he'd only seen a couple episodes of the show, because he hated it. "You don't make great ads by drinking and screwing all day," the old man bellowed. Murray had been a mad man-the creative director at a prominent advertising agency in the 1960s-and if some TV creeps were going to box up his life's work and file it under The Bad Old Days, it would be over his dead body--and that of his ex-wife, the young, sexy star copywriter who worked for him in his prime. Their son, writer David Murray, set out on a quest for the real meaning of his parents' work and its enduring influence, for ill and good. "Not just on me," he says, "but on all of us." He serves a rich, bittersweet dessert that Mad Men fans crave from a show that's dropping off its characters in mid-career. As Murray writes, "Mad Men asks us to contemplate the cynical recklessness of workplace drinking and the passion of office affairs. Reality challenges us to fathom the earnest, sober, plodding devotion to progress. Work MATTERED to these people." And their work still matters to us today, as readers of this concise book will discover. Because we were all ... Raised By Mad Men.