With its fresh and unprecedented opportunities for sexual involvements and new self-definitions, World War II was a pivotal event in the history of queer Americans. This is especially true of males who experienced the war as young adults, either as civilians or servicemen. Relying on the recollections of fourteen men, this chapter examines the war’s varying impact. Some of these recollections are lengthy portions of full-scale autobiographies, while others are considerably briefer. Some of the men are well known, such as Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Gore Vidal, while others are obscure, such as journalist Ricardo Brown, actor Gordon Heath, and diarist Donald Vining. A few autobiographies, such as Vidal’s Palimpsest and composer Ned Rorem’s Knowing When to Stop, are classics. In contrast, Ricardo Brown’s The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s is ostensibly only an ethnography of a gay bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, through the eyes of one patron, yet it is an essential examination of wartime queer life itself. Analyzed and compared side by side, these fourteen memoirs provide a heretofore unappreciated glimpse of both queer life and the war.

The great postwar buildout comprises the most dramatic chapter in the longer history of suburbanization in the US. No other moment compares in terms of scale, speed, or social significance: the period saw a broader white middle-class identity coalesce around suburban homeownership. The literature that attends to these physical and social transformations – narrative material that continues to shape perceptions of suburban life today, and that provides this chapter with its principal focus – is characterized by hyperbolic tensions about money. Concerns about not having quite enough of it repeatedly become matters of life and death in these stories; the very real advantages of suburban living are thus typically obscured or disavowed. This chapter argues, however, that some of the period’s literature possesses a further, instructional role: texts such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit offer guidance, in a manner not unlike contemporary self-help literature, about how to make money matter to just the right degree to maximize the advantages of suburban settlement. This fine balancing, which is always executed in the absence of any consideration of the precarity of others, is a precise measure of the privilege of these fictional white middle-class subjects.