Hey, John. Neat piece. I must admit: I knew much more about Tom than Thomas. Thank you.
As a guy who wrote a road-tripish novel, set in the late '60s (Boston-->Nebraska-->Montana-->Alaska; bit.ly/CWS-e) I'd be curious as to how (or if) you see Thomas Wolfe's work touching the rootless-weird Kerouac of the 1950s who influenced Hunter S. Thompson's 'gonzo' road-trip stuff in the '60s and '70s. Not Stegner's cup-o-tea (or mine--anymore) but they seem at least tangentially connected. Thots?
Hi Art, great question. I appreciate the insight behind it, which I might phrase as: Is there a Grand Unified Theory of the American Road Trip novel? And well, maybe. I'm still sort of stumbling/grasping toward it myself. I think Kerouac admired Wolfe for a manic stream of consciousness style, which "On the Road" captured in the road-trip novel that Wolfe never got to write, and then "Fear and Loathing" took to extremes. So yes. But on the other hand we have "Travels with Charley" and "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "Blue Highways" and (my favorite, super-obscure) "Let Us Build Us a City" that strike me as trying to use the road trip against that rootless-weird aesthetic. And there's another interpretation in which all of these writers are upper-middle-class straight white males playing with new technology (where "cars" and "roads" equals "technology"). So... I don't know. I'm open to other thoughts. :)
New tech(s) as the real frontier(s): much to that idea; yes; check. But then that opens up a huge can o' genre-boundary worms, b/c now we'll have to wrap Neal Stephenson into this also! Seriously, I'm going to put this in the thought hopper, especially your earlier chicken-egg Q re. stories surfing culture, changing it, or in another more complex relationship to it.
Hey, John. Neat piece. I must admit: I knew much more about Tom than Thomas. Thank you.
As a guy who wrote a road-tripish novel, set in the late '60s (Boston-->Nebraska-->Montana-->Alaska; bit.ly/CWS-e) I'd be curious as to how (or if) you see Thomas Wolfe's work touching the rootless-weird Kerouac of the 1950s who influenced Hunter S. Thompson's 'gonzo' road-trip stuff in the '60s and '70s. Not Stegner's cup-o-tea (or mine--anymore) but they seem at least tangentially connected. Thots?
Hi Art, great question. I appreciate the insight behind it, which I might phrase as: Is there a Grand Unified Theory of the American Road Trip novel? And well, maybe. I'm still sort of stumbling/grasping toward it myself. I think Kerouac admired Wolfe for a manic stream of consciousness style, which "On the Road" captured in the road-trip novel that Wolfe never got to write, and then "Fear and Loathing" took to extremes. So yes. But on the other hand we have "Travels with Charley" and "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "Blue Highways" and (my favorite, super-obscure) "Let Us Build Us a City" that strike me as trying to use the road trip against that rootless-weird aesthetic. And there's another interpretation in which all of these writers are upper-middle-class straight white males playing with new technology (where "cars" and "roads" equals "technology"). So... I don't know. I'm open to other thoughts. :)
New tech(s) as the real frontier(s): much to that idea; yes; check. But then that opens up a huge can o' genre-boundary worms, b/c now we'll have to wrap Neal Stephenson into this also! Seriously, I'm going to put this in the thought hopper, especially your earlier chicken-egg Q re. stories surfing culture, changing it, or in another more complex relationship to it.