Wilson, Sloan: - SLOAN WILSON is best known as the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, but he is also the author of fifteen books, including A Summer Place, which was adapted into a feature film, and of dozens of pieces for The New Yorker, Harper's and other magazines. It took him fifteen years to attain the rank of a full-time professional novelist. He has been a third-class blacksmith in a shipyard, a sailing instructor, a Coast Guard officer in command of small supply ships to Greenland and the South Pacific, a newspaper reporter, a foundation executive, an English professor, a public-relations man, a magazine editor, Education Editor for the New York Herald Tribune and Assistant Director of the White House Conference on Education.