What Happened To The Yuppie?– In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities

Tom McGrath's "Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation" (Grand Central) is an entertaining recap of that period. McGrath doesn't offer a novel sociological interpretation of the yuppies. What he has to say about them would have been conventional even during their time.

-  By Louis Menand – Illustration by Rui Pu

In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was news because America's metropolises, New York especially, had been given up for dead, gutted by white flight, a deteriorating economic base, and financial mismanagement. In the nineteen-seventies, New York had lost eight hundred thousand people, ten per cent of its population. Yet the evidence suggested, Fleetwood wrote, "that the New York of the 80's and 90's will no longer be a magnet for the poor and the homeless, but a city primarily for the ambitious and educated an urban elite." It was an uncannily accurate call.

Those "ambitious and educated"gentrifiers were the young urban professionals, the yuppies. The term first appeared in print in 1980, in a Chicago magazine piece by Dan Rottenberg. Rottenberg said that he had heard the word being used around Chicago, possibly in real-estate circles, but, wherever it came from, "yuppie" was an inspired coinage, in an etymological line of descent from "hippie," "Yippie," and "preppie," a similarly irresistible neologism.

After the word appeared in a Chicago Tribune column by Bob Greene, in 1983, "yuppie" took off. (Greene, too, claimed that he had heard it from someone else.) The column was syndicated in two hundred newspapers, and, overnight, the world turned yuppie. Gary Hart, running for President in the Democratic primaries, was the yuppie candidate. Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" was the yuppie novel. Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" was the yuppie movie. Madonna's "Material Girl" "The boy with the cold hard cash/Is always Mister Right"-was the yuppie anthem.