The Pump House Gang

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelist When Tom Wolfe smashed his way onto the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his next project, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The result is The Pump House Gang (published simultaneously with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968): a collection of essays that chronicles life at the end of the 1960s, written with all the panache and perceptiveness that made Wolfe one of our greatest American journalists. Running throughout The Pump House Gang is a central theme of Wolfe’s writing: status. In pieces about Hugh Hefner, Natalie Wood, and a gang of affluent teenage surfers, among others, Wolfe discusses the 1960s phenomenon of retreating from conventional social hierarchies, which he calls “starting your own league.” Dancers, motorcyclists, lumpen-dandies, and stay-at-homes—everybody’s doing it. Except for die-hards in the crumbling old social worlds of New York and London, where the confusion is so great that nobody can tell whether this is really the path to the top they’ve taken or just the service elevator. Dazzlingly brilliant as a stylist, daringly provocative as a commentator, and always entertaining, in The Pump House Gang, Wolfe is thoroughly, completely himself.

Tom Wolfe's The Purple Decades brings together the author's own selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play.

Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the Year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is being introduced by name. And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!-as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls' File-o-Fax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up's displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers... to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new field of genetics and neuroscience. . . to the inner workings of television's magazine-show sting operations. Printed here in its entirety is "Ambush at Fort Bragg," a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, "U. R. Here," the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe's forecast ("My Three Stooges," "The Invisible Artist") of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America. As an espresso after so much full-bodied twenty-first-century fare, we get a trip to Memory Mall. Reprinted here for the first time are Wolfe's two articles about The New Yorker magazine and its editor, William Shawn, which ignited one of the great firestorms of twentieth-century journalism. Wolfe's afterword about it all is in itself a delicious draught of an intoxicating era, the Twistin' Sixties. In sum, here is Tom Wolfe at the height of his powers as reporter, novelist, sociologist, memoirist, and-to paraphrase what Balzac called himself-the very secretary of American society in the 21st century.

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelist When Tom Wolfe smashed his way into the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his second book, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The Pump House Gang is the result: a collection of essays that chronicles life at the end of the 1960s, written with all the panache and perceptiveness that made Wolfe one of our greatest American journalists. Running throughout The Pump House Gang is a central theme of Wolfe’s writing: status. He discusses the 1960s phenomenon of retreating from conventional social hierarchies, which Wolfe calls “starting your own league.” Surfers, motorcyclists, lumpen-dandies, and stay-at-homes—everybody’s doing it. Except for die-hards in the crumbling old social worlds of New York and London, where the confusion is so great that nobody can tell whether this is really the path to the top they’ve taken or just the service elevator. Dazzlingly brilliant as a stylist, daringly provocative as a commentator, and always entertaining, in The Pump House Gang, Wolfe is thoroughly, completely himself.

The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

"An excellent book by a genius," said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of new journalism. "This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other."--Newsweek In his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) Wolfe introduces us to the sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

Available for the first time in years, this classic collection of essays and drawings chronicles the shifting moral terrain of American through the 1980s.

"When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."