“The life of every individual”: The one book Tom Wolfe thought every American writer should read
As a driving force behind New Journalism, Tom Wolfe blended his signature satire with the pillars of the movement: writing that fused news and culture writing with a literary sensibility, distorting all prior notions of journalism in the process.
Wolfe is perhaps best remembered through his best-selling work, 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early display of Gonzo journalism that was spearheaded by Hunter S Thompson. Wolfe’s work is his firsthand account as he followed writer Ken Kesey and his band of friends, the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled cross-country from California to New York in their rainbow-painted school bus, Furthur and threw their infamous “Acid Tests”, encountering an equally eccentric cast of characters along the way.
The Merry Pranksters would soon be known for their championing of psychedelic drugs, primarily LSD, and Wolfe’s capture of their efforts would become a definitive capsule of the hippie movement.
Writing across fiction and nonfiction works between 1959 to 2016, two years before his death at age 88, Wolfe brought an excitement to each of his works that, despite criticism, sought to radicalise American culture even further, engaging the reader in society’s most fascinating stories with his humorous and extravagant prose.
As curated in J Peder Zane’s 2007 book The Top Ten, Wolfe’s top ten favourite books reflect
a varied taste. He makes a nod to his “idol” in writing about society and culture, as he expressed to The Guardian, naming two novels by the French writer Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop) and Nana. “Zola simply could not – and was not interested in – telling a lie,” he asserted.
Wolfe also ventures into the familiar, noting Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck as favourites, as well as the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, among an array of works that show a tireless curiosity, but a key favourite, however, comes from American writer James T Farrell – a novelist, short story writer and journalist who became known for his characterisations of the working-class South Side Irish in his native Chicago, Illinois, coming from a large Irish-American family himself.
In the midst of the Great Depression, he began conceptualising what would become his Studs Lonigan novel trilogy, wanting to chronicle the debilitating effects of capitalism and political turmoil, and their joint effects on American society. Reliant on personal experience, Farrell created the titular Studs Lonigan, a man subject to the “spiritual poverty” of his environment, from his teenage years to adulthood.
Studs Lonigan deeply moved Wolfe, naming the entire trilogy among his favourites. “The life of every individual, sayeth the sage, runs along the line created by the intersection of two planes: personality and social setting,” he noted. “I can’t think of any American novelist who ever drew that line more brilliantly than James T Farrell in this trilogy.”
Wolfe also references the potential criticisms that came with Farrell’s personal style of writing, with an emphasis on looking to lived experience to craft a work of fiction. “If this be ‘plodding realism’,” Wolfe argues, “let every American novelist start plodding Studs-style, lest the American novel fall down in a heap and die, as it now seems wont to do.”
Wolfe’s reverence for Farrell’s perspective is notable in its imperative to capture the truth, and notes that to utilise fiction in expounding the truth is a necessary, valid form of the craft.
