Social clmbing and its discontents …

… Creative Destruction in Fiction | Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Educating for Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

O’Hara writes about ambition and the things it makes us do. His business people drive hard bargains and his married couples obsess about how they might move themselves up in the social pecking order. Worse, his young people, observing this behavior in their parents, are so jaundiced that they don’t seem to harbor much ambition at all. In the posthumously published story “Family Evening” (1972), a daughter refers to her elders as “the B.D.’s” or “Better Deads.”