Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude  

"What do Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette, Bertholt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones, Billie Holiday, James Dean, Lenny Bruce's irony, Eldridge Cleaver, Chrissie Hinde, heroin and gangsta rap all have in common? They are, for lack of a more precise word, cool.

Cool is by no means solely an American phenomenon, although its modern manifestation was incubated among black American jazz musicians during the 1930s and 1940s and finally injected into white youth culture during the 1950s by Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll." --Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (2000, page 12)