Writing
All but two of the stories in the book were written in 1965 and 1966, during the ten months after the publication of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. During this period Wolfe spent extensive time with many of his subjects, including Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy Magazine (who Wolfe famously compared to The Great Gatsby); Carol Doda, a stripper who helped popularize breast-implants; and the surfers of the pump house.
Other subjects Wolfe profiles in the book include actress Natalie Wood, the New York Hilton, the visionary media-theorist Marshall McLuhan and various socialites of New York. The essays collectively tell the story of the new status symbols and lifestyles of the 1960s and how the culture was changing from the traditional social hierarchies of the time. The success of the book cemented Wolfe as one of his generation's most prominent social critics.
Read more about this topic: The Pump House Gang
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b.1927)
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer’s life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)