(FORTUNE Magazine) – "There is a rich queerness to the U.S. scene in this summer of 1946.... Like a surrealist landscape, it is brilliant, gaudy, carefully drawn, and yet somehow nightmarish, distorted, and spotted with irrelevancies." We were describing the post-war boom. ("Toulouse-Lautrecs at $30,000, men's wristwatches at $1,000--all sell just about as fast as eggbeaters, table radios, and pork chops.") But we could as easily have been talking about the cover, which featured a model of "Walter Gibbs' first graphic thermodynamic surface--a statue of water in all its phases." Even more surreal were mentions of the "sober undergraduates" at the University of California and the food at Chicago's Pump Room--"highly mobile and usually in flames." Not to mention the second entry in our once-a-decade series, "White-Collar Man." Henry Hansjergen, assistant purchasing agent at Cincinnati Gas & Electric, was reduced to this: "$76 a week. A suburban home. Two weeks' vacation. Boy Scout hikes and the church. Success."

--Erik Torkells