Tom Wolfe, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel, Harper’s Magazine, Nov. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987).Ģ.
Siegel is Professor of Law and Davis Research Professor, George Washington University.ġ. the influence of society on even the most personal aspects of the life of the individual.”5 Indeed, Wolfe stated that he had written Bonfire to prove a point: that “the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting.”6 Wolfe’s challenge to American writers (not well-received by all of them)7 raised a question: Who would write a big, realistic novel that was of Washington, He wished that authors would use journalistic reporting techniques, which Zola had called “documentation,” to develop material that would allow them to “demonstrat. Wolfe expressed bafflement that such “big realistic novels” were not being written in America,3 and he called for a “battalion, a brigade of Zolas”4 to write them. The Wolfe of Washington? Two years after completing The Bonfire of the Vanities,1 a scathing, screamingly funny account of life in New York City as seen through the intersecting stories of characters from Wall Street and the South Bronx, Tom Wolfe published a literary manifesto called “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” in Harper’s Magazine.2 In this essay, Wolfe bemoaned the disappearance of the “realistic novel,” a novel that was of a city-that used the format of fiction, but did so to tell the larger truth of life in the city, as Balzac or Zola had used the novel to depict Paris, or as Dickens or Thackeray had portrayed London. Book Review of Supreme Courtship: a Novel by Christopher BuckleyĬhristopher Buckley, Supreme Courtship: A Novel, New York, NY: Hachette Book Group USA, 2008, pp.
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