In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires, which he finds "rude, boring and hopelessly adolescent. However, they have not always been this way. In fact, a century ago they were often quite sophisticated, used by artists varied as Blake, Poe, Coleridge, the Brontes, Shelley, and Keats, to explain aspects of interpersonal relations....

Uses an art-historical approach to examine twenty advertisements and advertising campaigns, named by the author as the most influential of the twentieth century; considering what makes each ad work, the story behind it, and how it changed viewers' perceptions of the advertised item, and other things as well.