I heartily recommend Mary McCarthy's "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man," one of the stories in The Company She Keeps. It's not nearly as well known as her "Man in the Brooks Brother Shirt," buit it is excellent in just the same way. Here's a little taste. — DL
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The inconsistencies he found whenever he examined his own thoughts troubled him a good deal. He found, for example, that he liked to drink and dance and go to medium-smart night clubs with medium-pretty girls. Yet he believed with Veblen that there was no greater folly than conspicuous consumption, and his eyes and ears told him that people were hungry while he had money in his pocket..This was a problem all well-to-do radicals had to face, and there were any number of ways of dealng wth it. You could stop being a radical, or you could give your money away. Or you could give a little of it away and say, "I owe something to myself," or give none of it away and say, "I'm not a saint, and besides I have something more important than money to contribute."
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