n 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 Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck.[2]
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.[3] 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 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.[4] 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."
