Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Foundation Chair and Professor of American Studies Emeritus at Smith College. He has written extensively on the history of consumer culture and social criticism in the twentieth-century United States, including the books The Morality of Spending (1985); Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994); Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique (1998); The Anxieties of Affluence (2004); and Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (2012). In May 2015 the University of Massachusetts Press will publish his On the Cusp: Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change, from which this essay is drawn. Mr. Horowitz lives with his wife, the historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
