In the years since World War II, what began in the United States as a shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy soon led to a massive outpouring of new commerical offerings of consumer products and services accompanied by unprecedented efforts to market these commodities. Friedman demonstrates how these extraordinary developments have affected American culture through a recently completed series of studies on changes in language used in the popular literature of the United States. Brand names served as the indicator of linguistic influence, and detailed content analyses were conducted to examine trends in use of brand names in popular literature contexts.