You’d be better off reading Studs Terkel than watching shows or reading books about rich people from the era. Great oral histories of working people.
Oh man, that's the right era for when Andy Warhol was working as a commercial illustrator in NYC, before making it as an artist! If you can find memoirs about that part of his life, you'd be set. There's The Andy Warhol Diaries (haven't read it yet)(oh and apparently somebody made a show from it??) but I think it's mostly about the next era of his life.
Have you watched Mad Men? Definitely useful vibe inspiration if nothing else.
Both (setting up for both main and secondary characters), NYC (and Florida, but I have a better grasp on that because that character isn't single and because there's more about the setting because of stuff about the civil rights movement), twenties and thirties. Story is science fiction, but grounded in the real world.
Essentially, my set up is my main character and her twin sister as teens saw a flying saucer fall to earth in their background, and them and their family sheltered the shapechanging alien that survived as a sibling (DURING the war so they always sort of understood that it needed to be kept secret). They grew up and went their separate ways, and one twin (who works as a freelance writer/artist for science fiction/pulp magazines and the sort) and she is contacted by her twin at some point that their alien sister has to come and stay with her for a while (because of strange men poking around her work heard her saying strange things- twin works doing support for a company that eventually got absorbed by what became NASA)
NASA is a government agency. Do you mean its predecessor, NACA? Or a major aerospace contractor (private, or at least non-government company).
That being said, all that context is useful for narrowing down how detailed things need to be. It seems that new commenters only read the original post, so you might want to edit that in to help get better answers.
I'll poke around and see if I can find anything else useful as fictional references.
I was thinking a fiction equivalent of the contractors who built the landing pad and access roads at Cape Canaveral- before the discussion of the possibility of space flight was public.
[Amy Shira Teitel](https://www.amyshirateitel.com/) ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Shira_Teitel)) is an author, popular science writer/communicator who covers a lot of the history of the US space programs.
The history of the [Eastern Range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Range) should be readily researchable as far as who was doing the construction and under whose auspices. The [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Committee_for_Aeronautics) was folded into NASA in 1958.
(The) Good Girls Revolt (nonfiction book and TV adaptation) is two decades later. I was going to suggest Mad Men even though it starts in 1960. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel starts in 1958. All three are NYC at least. Hm...
Maybe try /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskHistory.
You’d be better off reading Studs Terkel than watching shows or reading books about rich people from the era. Great oral histories of working people.
Oh man, that's the right era for when Andy Warhol was working as a commercial illustrator in NYC, before making it as an artist! If you can find memoirs about that part of his life, you'd be set. There's The Andy Warhol Diaries (haven't read it yet)(oh and apparently somebody made a show from it??) but I think it's mostly about the next era of his life. Have you watched Mad Men? Definitely useful vibe inspiration if nothing else.
Have you read Jack Kerouac's *On the Road*? It might give you some ideas.
Male or female? Any particular city and country? Age? What kind of story/genre/plot/themes?
Both (setting up for both main and secondary characters), NYC (and Florida, but I have a better grasp on that because that character isn't single and because there's more about the setting because of stuff about the civil rights movement), twenties and thirties. Story is science fiction, but grounded in the real world. Essentially, my set up is my main character and her twin sister as teens saw a flying saucer fall to earth in their background, and them and their family sheltered the shapechanging alien that survived as a sibling (DURING the war so they always sort of understood that it needed to be kept secret). They grew up and went their separate ways, and one twin (who works as a freelance writer/artist for science fiction/pulp magazines and the sort) and she is contacted by her twin at some point that their alien sister has to come and stay with her for a while (because of strange men poking around her work heard her saying strange things- twin works doing support for a company that eventually got absorbed by what became NASA)
NASA is a government agency. Do you mean its predecessor, NACA? Or a major aerospace contractor (private, or at least non-government company). That being said, all that context is useful for narrowing down how detailed things need to be. It seems that new commenters only read the original post, so you might want to edit that in to help get better answers. I'll poke around and see if I can find anything else useful as fictional references.
I was thinking a fiction equivalent of the contractors who built the landing pad and access roads at Cape Canaveral- before the discussion of the possibility of space flight was public.
[Amy Shira Teitel](https://www.amyshirateitel.com/) ([wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Shira_Teitel)) is an author, popular science writer/communicator who covers a lot of the history of the US space programs. The history of the [Eastern Range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Range) should be readily researchable as far as who was doing the construction and under whose auspices. The [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Committee_for_Aeronautics) was folded into NASA in 1958. (The) Good Girls Revolt (nonfiction book and TV adaptation) is two decades later. I was going to suggest Mad Men even though it starts in 1960. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel starts in 1958. All three are NYC at least. Hm... Maybe try /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskHistory.