[Spoiler Alert: This article contains references to plot points in the series finale of "Mad Men," the May 17 episode "Person to Person."]

Donald Francis Draper, a legendary ad man and a creative director at several top New York advertising agencies throughout the 1960s, finally met his fate, on a day in October 1970. What that fate was proved ambiguous; he was last seen on a California hilltop, smiling mysteriously.

Draper was born Dick Whitman in late 1925 in rural Illinois, the son of farmer Archie Whitman and a prostitute who died in childbirth. Whitman's childhood, according to the few times he ever spoke about it (including during one memorably agonizing pitch meeting with Hershey's Chocolate that all but cost Don Draper his job) was a Dickensian nightmare, marked by his father's alcoholism and the resentment of his stepmother, Abigail, who routinely referred to him as "whore's child." Shortly before the birth of his half-brother Adam, the 10-year-old Dick saw his drunken father killed by a kick in the face from a spooked horse.