At the turn of the nineteenth century, American capitalism was in crisis, producing too many goods for too few buyers. That crisis was ultimately resolved in a novel, historically decisive manner by creating whole new categories of consumer goods and appealing to new groups of people which might purchase them. What we now recognize as consumer society originated in this period, and it was mass culture, the first "culture industry," that helped to bring it into being.

In a magisterial study of this process, Richard Ohmann surveys the new practices of advertising, mass distribution of goods, and, most important, the birth of the inexpensive mass-audience magazine to analyse the creation of the American professional-managerial class.

Drawing upon work in economic, cultural, and social history, he integrates the seemingly disparate phenomena of modern middle-class life in a coherent tale of how this class was formed and came to occupy the foreground in that malign ideological formation "the American Dream."