The Mad Men Reading List: 25 Revealing Books Read by the Characters on the Show

Image cour­tesy of The New York Pub­lic Library.

The good peo­ple over at the New York Pub­lic Library com­piled a list of books read by the char­ac­ters of Mad Men, which just start­ed the last half of its sev­enth and final sea­son. Over the course of the series, the show’s char­ac­ters drank sev­er­al swim­ming pools worth of cock­tails, engaged in a host of ill-advised illic­it affairs and, on occa­sion, dreamed up a bril­liant adver­tis­ing cam­paign or two. As it turns out, they also read quite a bit.

All the books seem to say some­thing about the inner life of each char­ac­ter. The show’s enig­mat­ic main char­ac­ter, Don Drap­er, favored works like Dante’s Infer­no and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – books that point towards Draper’s series-long down­ward spi­ral. The whiny, inse­cure Pete Camp­bell read Thomas Pynchon’s para­noid clas­sic The Cry­ing of Lot 49. And Bert Coop­er, the aris­to­crat­ic bow-tie sport­ing patri­arch of Ster­ling Coop­er is appar­ent­ly an Ayn Rand fan; he’s seen read­ing Atlas Shrugged ear­ly in the series. You can see the full read­ing list below or here in a beau­ti­ful PDF designed by the NYPL.

A num­ber of the texts list­ed below also appear in our Free eBooks and Free Audio­Books col­lec­tions.

DON DRAPER’S PICKS:

• EXODUS by Leon Uris (Episode 106 “Baby­lon”)
• THE BEST OF EVERYTHING by Rona Jaffe
• MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY by Frank O’Hara
• THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkn­er
• THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD by Ruth Bene­dict
• THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John Le Carre
• THE FIXER by Bernard Mala­mud
• ODDS AGAINST by Dick Fran­cis
• THE INFERNO by Dante Alighieri
• THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Lar­ry McMurtry
• PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth

ROGER STERLING’S PICK:

• CONFESSIONS OF AN ADVERTISING MAN by David Ogilvy

JOAN HARRIS’S PICK:

• LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER by D. H. Lawrence

PETE CAMPBELL’S PICKS:

• THE CRYING OF LOT 49 by Thomas Pyn­chon
• GOODNIGHT MOON by Mar­garet Wise Brown

BETTY DRAPER’S PICKS:

• BABYLON REVISITED AND OTHER STORIES by F. Scott Fitzger­ald
• THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy

LANE PRYCE’S PICK:

• THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER by Mark Twain

HENRY FRANCIS’S PICK:

• THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain

BERT COOPER’S PICK:

• ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand

SALLY DRAPER’S PICKS:

• THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gib­bon
• TWENTY ONE BALLOONS by William Pene Du Bois
• NANCY DREW: THE CLUE OF THE BLACK KEYS by Car­olyn Keene
• THE BLACK CAULDRON by Lloyd Alexan­der
• ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin

via The New York Pub­lic Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Ernest Hemingway’s List for a Young Writer

Carl Sagan’s Under­grad Read­ing List: 40 Essen­tial Texts for a Well-Round­ed Thinker

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.