Set at the dawn of the Kennedy era among the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing employees of a Madison Avenue advertising firm, AMC's Mad Men began as an impeccably tailored satire of a bygone age. But it soon became something richer and deeper: a portrait of American culture on the brink of major upheavals, with irresistible protagonist Don Draper, the superstar creative director with a tragic past, at its center. As played by Jon Hamm, Draper is one of the most seductively complicated characters the small screen has ever given us—stoic yet vulnerable, ardent yet repressed, self-invented yet a product of his time and place, a chauvinist pig and a stone cold fox.

Related: Books That Made a Difference to Jon Hamm 
From the August 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

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