Sloan Wilson

Sloan Wilson (May 8, 1920 – May 25, 2003) was an American writer who published works including The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Early life

Wilson was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, the grandson of United States Navy officer and Arctic explorer John Wilson Danenhower. He graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1942. He then served in World War II as an officer of the United States Coast Guard commanding a naval trawler for the Greenland Patrol and an army supply ship in the Pacific Ocean.

Career

After the war, Wilson worked as a reporter for Time-Life. His first book, Voyage to Somewhere, was published in 1947 and was based on his wartime experiences. He published stories in The New Yorker and worked as a professor at the University at Buffalo also known as the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Wilson published 15 books including the bestsellers The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and A Summer Place (1958), both were adapted into feature films. A later novel, A Sense of Values, in which protagonist Nathan Bond is a disenchanted cartoonist involved with adultery and alcoholism, was not well received. In Georgie Winthrop, a college vice president, 45, begins a relationship with the 17-year-old daughter of his childhood love. The novel, The Ice Brothers, is loosely based on Wilson's experiences in Greenland while serving with the U.S. Coast Guard. What Shall We Wear to This Party?, a memoir, 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 the assistant director of the National Citizens Commission for Public Schools as well as assistant director of the 1955–1956 White House Conference on Education.

Personal life

Wilson suffered from alcoholism throughout his adult life and Alzheimer's disease toward the end. In addition to novels and magazine articles, he supported himself during his later years by writing commissioned works like biographies and yacht histories.

Wilson was married twice, first to Elise Pickhardt in 1941. They had three children including the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He and Betty Stephens married in 1962 and they had a daughter. In the 1970s, Wilson and his wife and daughter lived at Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove, Florida (an area in Miami) on a 54 ft (16 m) cruiser, the Pretty Betty. Sloan Wilson died May 25, 2003, at 83, in the sailing community of Colonial Beach, Virginia, where he had lived on a boat for several years prior to his death.