“I invented myself.”

American advertising executive and restaurateur

Jerry Della Femina is an American advertising executive and restaurateur, active in the mid and late 20th century. Born into a poor Italian family in Brooklyn, he became chairman of Della Femina Travisano & Partners, the agency he founded with Ron Travisano in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, the firm grew into a major advertising house with offices in New York and Los Angeles, and Della Femina became known for his outsized personality and sharp, colorful language. In 1970, he published From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War, a bestseller that was later described as a defining book about advertising and went on to inspire the television series Mad Men.