Minding the Store

April 14th, 2008

In a course he taught at Harvard Business School, esteemed psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Coles asked future hedge fund managers and other aspiring “masters of the universe”  to pause and reflect on their chosen profession, using literature to explore the experience of a very real world with its very real challenges and opportunities. This anthology shares with the wider world of corporate professionals, armchair entrepreneurs, indeed any student of commerce and literature, a riveting selection from that course’s readings, and beyond. The Wall Street Journal celebrated the inclusion of Jill Nelson’s “elegant, often hilarious prose, … James Agee’s iconic journal of the Great Depression,” and literary gems from the likes of John Updike and Raymond Carver that remind us “what genuine craftsmen can do with the American suburbs”—and beyond: from Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and John Cheever’s “Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (in which a businessman survives a moral crisis after stealing his neighbor’s wallet), Minding the Store is a generous, richly entertaining, and above all timely collection of classic literary gems illuminating the human predicaments and the moral quandaries of the business world.

Robert Coles, M.D., is James Agee Professor of Social Ethics (emeritus) at Harvard University, where he taught “Literature of Social Reflection,” a senior seminar, for a quarter century at Harvard College, as well as at Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, and elsewhere. He is the author of the Children of Crisis series of books, among many others, and lives in Concord, Massachusetts.