Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast

Last updated

"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" is an essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism.

Contents

Background

After being serialized in Rolling Stone magazine, Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987. Prior to the novel, Wolfe had made his career as a journalist and author of non-fiction books. Wolfe had been a pioneer of "New Journalism," a style of non-fiction that relied heavily on novelistic techniques such as the use of scene, dialogue, first-person point of view from the subjects of the stories and recording minute details of everyday routine.

In his novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe used many of the writing techniques in his journalism, but this time to tell what Wolfe called a "fictional novel" (though novel traditionally denotes fiction and is hence redundant, Wolfe's "New Journalism" was sometimes described as non-fiction novels). In addition, Wolfe set out in Bonfire to capture the spirit of New York City in the 1980s. The book was a commercial success, becoming a New York Times Bestseller and earning critical praise. [1]

Essay

In his Harper's essay, Wolfe (at the time a contributing editor of the magazine) argues that American authors had strayed far from the tradition of realism seen in the writing of giants of American literature like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. [2]

Wolfe uses his own writing to illustrate his point: when he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , he expected a novelist to write a great fictional tale about the hippie movement; after writing Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , about racial strife in cities in the '60s and '70s, he expected great novels to follow suit; after The Right Stuff , he expected a novel about astronauts and NASA. [3] Wolfe says that, to his surprise, great novels on these cultural movements never arrived:

Publishers, "Had their noses pressed against their thermopane glass walls scanning the billion-footed city for the approach of the young novelists who, surely, would bring them the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippie movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures, it seemed, no longer existed. The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life."

Wolfe places the split from realism at 1960; after which the literary establishment turned to absurdist novels, magical realism, minimalism, postmodernism and foreign writers, "the gods of the new breed." Wolfe singles out Milan Kundera, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Harold Pinter, Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez as exemplars of this new obsession. [4] Wolfe sees these trends as the novel sliding into irrelevancy. Wolfe concludes that authors must return to realism, "If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain but also seized the high ground of literature itself."

Reaction and criticism

Wolfe's essay caused an uproar among writers, literary critics and journalists. Three months after the essay appeared, author Robert Towers wrote in The New York Times , "I cannot offhand recall an article in a small magazine making a bigger splash in the literary pool than Tom Wolfe's manifesto..." [4] For months after the essay, Wolfe appeared on television and on the lecture circuit defending and debating his thesis. [5] While some critics agreed with Wolfe, [2] others took issue with his essay, stating that he essentially had argued that other writers need to be more like himself. [1]

Critics also noted that while many authors wrote the sorts of books Wolfe criticized, there were countless authors like Don DeLillo or John le Carré, Louise Erdrich or Toni Morrison, who wrote realism and were critically praised. [4] [1] The Times described the essay as "one part serious argument with two parts calculated provocation," noting that the essay had helped continue discussion (and boost sales) of Bonfire of the Vanities . [5] Others were outright dismissive, with author Jim Harrison opining that Wolfe's ideas were "the Babbitry of art in a new, white suit." [6]

Wolfe wrote later works in the genre of "fictional novels," 1998's A Man in Full and 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons . [7] The essay launched a feud between Wolfe and other prominent literary figures that never ended. In 2000, he called John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer, "the three stooges" in response to their criticisms of his novels. Irving, for example, had dismissed Wolfe's work as "yak" and "journalistic hyperbole." [8] Similar name-calling surrounded the release of I Am Charlotte Simmons. [7] The essay was also cited and critiqued in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream".

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Updike</span> American writer (1932–2009)

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Irving</span> American-Canadian novelist and screenwriter (born 1942)

John Winslow Irving is an American-Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Wolfe</span> American author and journalist (1930–2018)

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Much of Wolfe's work was satirical and centred on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class, social status, and the lifestyles of the economic and intellectual elites of New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative nonfiction</span> Genre of writing

Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.

<i>The Bonfire of the Vanities</i> Novel by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City, and centers on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow.

New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.

<i>A Man in Full</i> 1998 novel by Tom Wolfe

A Man in Full is the second novel by Tom Wolfe, published on November 12, 1998, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is set primarily in Atlanta, with a significant portion of the story also taking place in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area.

James Douglas Graham Wood is an English[a] literary critic, essayist and novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela Hansford Johnson</span> English writer

Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic.

Daniel Fuchs was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist.

<i>Hooking Up</i> 2000 collection of essays by Tom Wolfe

Hooking Up is a collection of essays and a novella by American author Tom Wolfe, a number of which were earlier published in popular magazines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Mallon</span> American novelist, essayist, and critic (born 1951)

Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism, diaries, letters and the Kennedy assassination, as well as two volumes of essays.

<i>The New Journalism</i> Book by Tom Wolfe

The New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious. The pieces are notable because they do not conform to the standard dispassionate and even-handed model of journalism. Rather they incorporate literary devices usually only found in fictional works.

The non-fiction novel is a literary genre that, broadly speaking, depicts non-fictional elements, such as real historical figures and actual events, woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serial (literature)</span> Publishing format by which a single literary work is presented in contiguous instalments

In literature, a serial is a printing or publishing format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in smaller, sequential instalments. The instalments are also known as numbers, parts, fascicules or fascicles, and may be released either as separate publications or within sequential issues of a periodical publication, such as a magazine or newspaper.

<i>Visiting Mrs Nabokov</i>

Visiting Mrs Nabokov is a 1993 collection of non-fiction writing by the British author Martin Amis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carol Sklenicka</span> American writer

Carol Sklenicka is an American biographer and literary scholar known for her authoritative, full-scale biographies of two important figures in late twentieth-century American literature: acclaimed short story masters Raymond Carver and Alice Adams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Novelist</span> Writer of novels

A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literature of New England</span>

The literature of New England has had an enduring influence on American literature in general, with themes such as religion, race, the individual versus society, social repression, and nature, emblematic of the larger concerns of American letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?</span> 2006 poll of writers

"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".

References

  1. 1 2 3 Jack Miles (1989-11-12). "Endpapers: Tom Wolfe's Literary Manifesto: A Response". The Los Angeles Times .
  2. 1 2 Jonathan Yardley (1989-10-30). "For American Novelists, It's Time to Get Real". The Washington Post .
  3. ↑ "Tom Wolfe throws down a glove; Back to reality". The Economist . 1989-11-11.
  4. 1 2 3 Robert Towers (1990-01-28). "The Flap Over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?". The New York Times .
  5. 1 2 Freddie Baveystock (1990-02-22). "Bonfire of the literary world". The Times .
  6. ↑ Charles Trueheart (1990-04-21). "Tom Wolfe, Taming His College Critics; Collection a Hopkins Degree & Defending the Harper's Essay". The Washington Post .
  7. 1 2 Lev Grossman (2004-11-08). "I am Still Tom Wolfe". Time Magazine .
  8. ↑ Craig Offman (2000-01-21). "Tom Wolfe calls Irving, Mailer and Updike "the Three Stooges"". Salon.com.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.