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 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.