Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast
Encyclopedia
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
.
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 novel
s). 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.
, William Faulkner
and John Steinbeck
.
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
. Wolfe says that, to his surprise, great novels on these cultural movements never arrived:
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 Garcia Marquez
as exemplars of this new obsession. 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."
, "I cannot offhand recall an article in a small magazine making a bigger splash in the literary pool than Tom Wolfe's manifesto..." For months after the essay, Wolfe appeared on television and on the lecture circuit defending and debating his thesis. While some critics agreed with Wolfe, others took issue with his essay, stating that he essentially had argued that other writers need to be more like himself.
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. 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
. Others were outright dismissive, author Jim Harrison
wrote that Wolfe's ideas were "the Babbitry of art in a new, white suit."
Wolfe wrote later works in the genre of "fictional novels," 1998's A Man in Full
and 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons
. 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." Similar name-calling surrounded the release of I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
.
Background
After being serialized in Rolling StoneRolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine, Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Bonfire of the Vanities
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 four main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, British expatriate...
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
New Journalism
New Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included...
," 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 novel
Non-fiction novel
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events narrated woven together with fictitious allegations and using the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely-defined and flexible genre...
s). In addition, Wolfe set out in Bonfire to capture the spirit of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in the 1980s. The book was a commercial success, becoming a New York Times Bestseller and earning critical praise.
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 HemingwayErnest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
and John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
.
Wolfe uses his own writing to illustrate his point: when he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of literary journalism by Tom Wolfe, published in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of hysterical realism and pioneering new journalism, the "nonfiction novel" tells the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters...
, he expected a novelist to write a great fictional tale about the hippie movement
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
; after writing Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe's fourth, is composed of two articles by Wolfe, "These Radical Chic Evenings," first published in June of 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party and...
, about racial strife in cities in the '60s and '70s, he expected great novels to follow suit; after The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff (book)
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar experiments with experimental rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the NASA space program...
, he expected a novel about astronauts and NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
. 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
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
novels, magical realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
, minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
and foreign writers, "the gods of the new breed." Wolfe singles out Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
, Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
as exemplars of this new obsession. 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 TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, "I cannot offhand recall an article in a small magazine making a bigger splash in the literary pool than Tom Wolfe's manifesto..." For months after the essay, Wolfe appeared on television and on the lecture circuit defending and debating his thesis. While some critics agreed with Wolfe, others took issue with his essay, stating that he essentially had argued that other writers need to be more like himself.
Critics also noted that while many authors wrote the sorts of books Wolfe criticized, there were countless authors like Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
or John le Carré
John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell , who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré"...
, Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich
Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, is an author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American heritage. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...
or Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
, who wrote realism and were critically praised. The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
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
The Bonfire of the Vanities
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 four main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, British expatriate...
. Others were outright dismissive, author Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
James "Jim" Harrison is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway...
wrote that Wolfe's ideas were "the Babbitry of art in a new, white suit."
Wolfe wrote later works in the genre of "fictional novels," 1998's A Man in Full
A Man in Full
A Man in Full is a novel by Tom Wolfe, published in 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is set primarily in Atlanta.-Summary:As with Wolfe's other novels, A Man In Full features a number of point-of-view characters...
and 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons
I Am Charlotte Simmons
I Am Charlotte Simmons is a 2004 novel by Tom Wolfe, concerning sexual and status relationships at the fictional Dupont University, closely modeled after Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University...
. The essay launched a feud between Wolfe and other prominent literary figures that never ended. In 2000, he called John Irving
John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...
, John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
and Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
, "the three stooges" in response to their criticisms of his novels. Irving, for example, had dismissed Wolfe's work as "yak" and "journalistic hyperbole." Similar name-calling surrounded the release of I Am Charlotte Simmons.