''The Pump House Gang'' is a 1968 collection of essays and journalism by
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018)Some sources say 1931; ''The New York Times'' and Reuters both initially reported 1931 in their obituaries before changing to 1930. See and was an American author and journalist widely ...
. The stories in the book explored various aspects of the
counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...
. The most famous story in the collection, from which the book takes its name, is about
Jack Macpherson and his gang of surfers that frequented a sewage pump house at
Windansea Beach
Windansea Beach is a stretch of coastline located in La Jolla, a community of San Diego, California. The neighborhood adjacent to the beach is named Windansea after the beach. It is named after the 1909 oceanfront Strand Hotel that was renamed "W ...
in
La Jolla
La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781.
La Jolla is surrounded on ...
,
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
.
Publication
''The Pump House Gang'' was published on the same day in 1968 as ''
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' is a 1968 nonfiction book by Tom Wolfe. The book is a popular example of the New Journalism literary style. Wolfe presents a firsthand account of the experiences of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, ...
'', Wolfe's story about the
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...
-fueled adventures of
Ken Kesey
Ken Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Kesey was born in ...
and the
Merry Pranksters
The Merry Pranksters were comrades and followers of American author Ken Kesey in 1964.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy roa ...
. They were Wolfe's first books since ''
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
''The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby'' is the title of Tom Wolfe's first collected book of essays, published in 1965. The book is named for one of the stories in the collection that was originally published in ''Esquire magazine'' i ...
'' in 1965 which, like ''The Pump House Gang'', was a collection of Wolfe's non-fiction essays.
Though both books were well received and would go on to become best-sellers, of the two ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' was hailed as an instant classic and would become the better-known of the two books.
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
Hugh Marston Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was an American magazine publisher. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of ''Playboy'' magazine, a publication with revealing photographs and articles which provoked charges of obsc ...
, the founder of ''
Playboy
''Playboy'' is an American men's lifestyle and entertainment magazine, formerly in print and currently online. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother.
K ...
'' magazine (whom Wolfe famously compared to
The Great Gatsby
''The Great Gatsby'' is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts First-person narrative, first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious mil ...
);
Carol Doda
Carol Ann Doda (August 29, 1937November 9, 2015) was an American topless dancer based in San Francisco, California, who was active from the 1960s through the 1980s. She was the first public topless dancer in the United States.
In 1964, Doda made ...
, a stripper who helped popularize breast implants; and the surfers of the pump house.
[Wolfe, Tom. "The Pump House Gang," Introduction]
Other subjects Wolfe profiles in the book include actress
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood ( Zacharenko; July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981) was an American actress who began her career in film as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles.
Wood started acting at age four and was given a co-starring r ...
, the
New York Hilton
The New York Hilton Midtown is the largest hotel in New York City and world's 101st tallest hotel. The hotel is owned by Park Hotels & Resorts and managed by Hilton Worldwide. At 1,929 rooms and over 150,000 sq ft of meeting space, the hotel ...
, then-
Mod
Mod, MOD or mods may refer to:
Places
* Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band
* M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US ...
Joan Juliet Buck
Joan Juliet Buck (born 1948) is an American writer and actress. She was the editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, French ''Vogue'' from 1994 to 2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine. She was contributing editor to ''Vogue (maga ...
,
the visionary media-theorist
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his ...
and various
socialite
A socialite is a person from a wealthy and (possibly) aristocratic background, who is prominent in high society. A socialite generally spends a significant amount of time attending various fashionable social gatherings, instead of having traditio ...
s 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.
Style
The stories in ''The Pump House Gang'' are written in the style of
New Journalism
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non ...
that Wolfe and other writers like
Joan Didion
Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. Along with Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese, she is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an ...
and
Gay Talese
Gaetano "Gay" Talese (; born February 7, 1932) is an American writer. As a journalist for ''The New York Times'' and ''Esquire'' magazine during the 1960s, Talese helped to define contemporary literary journalism and is considered, along with T ...
helped to popularize. According to ''
Time'' magazine's review of Wolfe's book:
He uses a language that explodes with comic-book words like "POW!" and "boing." His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names and anatomical terms. He is irritating, but he did develop a new journalistic idiom that has brought relief from standard Middle-High Journalese.
Wolfe's style was simultaneously mocked and widely imitated. In 1990 the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' interviewed many of the surfers who had been involved with the pump house gang. Some of the surfers claimed that Wolfe took liberties with the facts to embellish and mythologize the lifestyle of the surfers. Other members of the pump house gang believe Wolfe's characterizations were correct.
Contents
''The Pump House Gang'' contains fifteen stories:
# "The Pump House Gang"
# "The Mid-Atlantic Man"
# "King of the Status Dropouts"
# "The Put-Together Girl"
# "The Noonday Underground"
# "The Shockkkkkk of Recognition"
# "The Hair Boys"
# "What if He Is Right?"
# "Bob and Spike"
# "Tom Wolfe's New Book of Etiquette"
# "The Life & Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl"
# "The Private Game"
# "The Automated Hotel"
# "The Mild Ones"
# "O Rotten Gotham—Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink"
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pump House Gang, The
1968 books
Essay collections by Tom Wolfe
Books about California
Farrar, Straus and Giroux books