Quick question for you all reading. I’m trying to think of current, living, vital writers, thinkers, public figures, artists, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, etc., who are uncommonly sensitive to the deep zeitgeist of American life, able to communicate easily and powerfully to wide audiences, and particularly able to capture the richness and zest of American society and history in its ambiguity and uncertainties without being polemical. I’m looking for people who have their finger on the pulse of American society. Sense of humor and ability to not take oneself overly seriously is helpful but not necessary.
To give you some examples, some people I thought fit the bill, more or less, were:
Larry McMurtry
Garry Wills
Jon Stewart
Stephen King
Suggestions? I’ll settle also for independent, contrarian thinkers who arguably could have that kind of sharply observed perspective on American social and political life, even if they largely write about other things, like George Packer.
Update: Gary Farber and Patrick Nielsen Hayden correct my spelling. And I reveal something of what I had in mind in asking this question, all below in the comments. Plus many cool suggestions, some of whom were on my own long list, some of whom were not.
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
Garrison Keillor.
Andrei Codrescu
Harry Shearer (I don’t know if he writes much, but you can check out his radio show, Le Show, online)
Keillor, Bill Moyers, Kurt Vonnegut
Gerald Haslam is an interesting fellow. He might be too narrow for your purposes, or too old. He has a “sharply observed perspective on American social and political life”, but it may not be the America you had in mind.
Louis Menand and John McPhee, Neal Stephenson, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Elizabeth Hardwick and Samuel R. Delany (in essays), and formerly Edmund Wilson.
And Greil Marcus, I don’t know how I left him out before.
Louis Menand.
Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Cormac Mcarthy.
The guy who wrote American Theocracy.
Over the past fifteen years or so, Douglas Coupland. And no, I’m not just talking about Generation X.
Menand for sure! Alan Wolfe maybe. Tony Judt perhaps (not American born, but all the better for being an outsider.) Benjamin DeMott. Barbara Ehrenreich. Errol Morris. Martha Nussbaum. Henry Louis Gates. Tom Frank. Christopher Lasch perhaps, if he weren’t dead.
If you exclude all of his NYT editorials, David Brooks. He’s about the only person who can write penetratingly about suburbia without sneering (much).
P J O’Rourke. An absolutely stunning and very funny writer. His best ever, IMO, is the Rolling Stone article on sprawl.
Art Spiegelman.
I take it you mean “are CURRENTLY uncommonly sensitive to the deep zeitgeist of American life” rather than “have been historically or lately sensative” ? My suggestions are just a wee bit dated, but I think they were/are oddly predictive of social and political affect: Martin Scorcese and M. Night Shyamalan. Oh, and Robert Reich. He’s very now.
According to UD his Jefferson lecture was under-whelming, but I would vote for Tom Wolfe.
I always liked Anna Quindlen.
Currently in the sense of, “If you asked them right now in a conversation, would they still have interesting things to say?” So, for example, while Norman Mailer could be said to have once had interesting things to say, I’m thinking at the moment he doesn’t.
Absolutely, definitely, David Foster Wallace. Non-fiction and fiction.
A bit trendy, but the new N+1 literary magazine is worth reading too.
Tom Wolfe ardently defines himself as exactly the kind of person you’re looking for. But I’m guessing you would not put him high on your list.
Yes and no, I guess. I tend to share the opinion that Wolfe isn’t quite as sharp a social observer as Wolfe acclaims himself to be. But I think he belongs in this kind of discussion, no doubt about it.
Garrison Keillor is a funny choice given a recent article in Chronicle of Higher Ed about how he commands such a huge audience and yet says nothing of critical value… (he maintains a stable story of everyday oddities in order to assuage the consciences of his (middlebrow? – i suppose his audience are actually more eclectic than that) audiences. See:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i36/36b01501.htm
So, Garrison Keillor brings up a question to me. When you say they have a finger on the pulse of America – well, do you mean someone like Karl Rove, who arguably does have a finger on the pulse of a larger portion of America, however distasteful that America is to some.
I also noticed that a woman thinker/writer was not mentioned until Comment 9. Significant? Important? I too like Martha Nussbaum, and her work on animals and sentient foundations for human rights is interesting. I’m not sure she is speaking to wide audiences – perhaps. Again, depends what that means.
How about someone like Dave Chappelle? Seems to me he speaks to alot of people. Or is he already fitting into “too polemical”?
Wow, I’m having a hard time thinking of names. Perhaps part and parcel of my focus on African literatures. And my intuition (perhaps unfounded) that the center of gravity has moved from America….
In addition to the great suggestions already made, the following people / groups are high on my list:
Doug Rushkoff
Malcolm Gladwell
Kathy Sierra
Howard Rheingold
One of the BoingBoing crew (Mark Frauenfelder, Cory Doctorow, etc.)
One of the IFTF crew (Paul Saffo, Alex Pang, etc.)
Hugh MacLeod (if you’re looking for someone with more of an edge)
Well, I’m thinking of non-evil people, so that kicks Rove off the list. Keillor isn’t especially high in my own esteem, but it’s valid to bring him up. I would like to see more women named as well: hoping for more suggestions. Dave Chappelle is a neat choice; he’s interestingly ambivalent about what it means that he speaks to a wide audience.
I find Stanley Crouch always fascinating reading. While he’s incredibly polemical he’s also a brilliant writer and very funny too. Colson Whitehead (author of The Intuitionist and John Henry Days) is also a good choice if you want someone less famous.
Tyler Cowen’s books are fascinating because you can get an entirely new way of understanding the way arts and culture function in society from him.
Craig Venter isn’t a writer at all, but he’s a biologist and an entrepeneur and he kinds of sums up the entire biotech industry in a single person. He’s maybe an ideal subject for the sort of writer you want.
Crouch is a nice choice. Venter too. I like Cowen very much.
In a more academic vein:
TJ Jackson Lears (best historian writing about America)
Sherry Ortner
In more “lay” forums:
Third vote for Louis Menand
Tom Carson (at least a few years ago–is he still writing?)
Why hasn’t anyone mentioned Ira Glass?
Gary Krist (fiction about suburbia, eg “Garden State”)
another vote for Barbara Ehrenreich
and (now that I think about it, my favorite nomination here): Jane Smiley
Ira Glass and Jane Smiley are lovely suggestions in particular.
Yes, anoter vote for Ira Glass.
You know who can do this when she wants to? Oprah Winfrey. Another oddball answer (though I like Dave Chappelle, too): Patton Oswalt. Ang Lee talks here mostly about movies but seems right on. Another filmmaker: Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt). Roger Ebert can talk smart about the U.S., too.
If Jane Smiley, then Russell Banks, too. Not as lovely, but deeply American.
And what about Carl Hiassen?
How can you deny that Wolfe is an incredibly “sharp” social observer? Bonfire of the Vanities + Man in Full + I am Charlotte Simmons == Duke lacrosse scandal.
Unhelpfully, the first name that occured to me, before I scrolled further down and saw your list, was “Garry Wills.”
I’d make a joke about being unfamiliar with Gary Wills, but it would be lame.
But it’s late enough in the evening for no one else to jump immediately to mind. I’ll get back to you if someone occurs.
Louis Menand is good, yes. Some of the above suggestions seem to clearly suggest that “polemical” has a different meaning to the writer than to me. Vonnegut and O’Rourke, for instance, cross that line for me, even though I like both their work in their own way. And I admire Ehrenheich, but also would say she at least walks the border, and sometimes cross it, of being polemical.
For more original suggestions, as I said, I’ll see if I can get back to you.
On Tom Wolfe, well, what interesting things has he said in the last two years?
BTW, Haslam looks very interesting, Gary. Thanks, I hadn’t heard of him.
Touching on Prof. Burke’s call for more women: a quick tally of the mentioned and out of all those suggested as tapped into what it means to be American: out of 49 people, 4 persons of color (3 black, one south asian), and 3 women. My math, as always, maybe off by one or two. Not a critique by any means, but an indication of whom we as a society may consider an “American Thinker”.
Ricky Jay, clearly.
Barbara Kingsolver.
Sarah Vowell.
Arlie Hochschild.
I think our host must have missed the point dropped on him like an anvil by Gary Farber, which is that it’s spelled _Garry_ Wills, not “Gary Wills”.
For some reason this one drives me nuts, just like all those people constantly citing “Publisher’s Weekly”.
My own suggestion: John McPhee. Yes, still.
For better or worse Spielberg. I mean if a wide audience is a requirement. If not, then I nominate Joe Frank.
Frank Gehry
Yeah, I missed it. Tired when I made the original entry. Fixed now.
Re Jish’s comment, I suspect the paucity of women here is due less to our definition of “American thinker” than our definition of “polemical.” I tried to think of women too (Sarah Vowell was a good one), but everyone I could think of (Ehrenreich, Pollitt, Paglia…) satisfies my criteria for polemicism. Not that there’s anything wrong with polemicism, but the rules of TB’s game say “Not now.”
Yes. My feeling is that the term “polemicism” excludes a great many people “from the margins” so to speak. I wanted to mention bell hooks or cornel west but imagined they’d be rejected on the basis of their being polemical. I thought of Anna Deveare Smith (writer of one-woman plays Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles. I also thought of Tony Kushner but again, after hearing speak on a college campus in the past year, I think many would perceive him as polemical.) Errol Morris?
I’m curious what the impetus was for the post/question?
I think I’d name Anna Deveare Smith and Tony Kushner on the strength of their creative work, especially Smith. But it is interesting, and of complex significance, that when you put out a call for people along the lines I named–contrarian, independent, not especially polemical, and deeply concerned with Americanness, American culture, etc., that seems to warn people off of some of a significant range of public thinkers. As far as race goes, I think this is because many public intellectuals of color do tend to have strongly polemical (which does not mean illegitimate) orientations. But then, there’s also a significant range of figures on the right who equally appropriately fall off the list at that point.
As for what I’m up to, hm. Well, partly it was just an idle thing born of a chance conversation, but part of the conversation was a question: Who do you think could help the Democratic Party construct or identify a deep “narrative” that connect the party to fundamental strains in American thought and history? I kind of take it for granted that many of the strongest voices on the left can’t do that at the moment, for various reasons, or have already tried and failed in various respects. This, I know, is a source of serious disagreement between me and many other bloggers and intellectuals. I was trying to think of people where, if you wanted a fresh take on the problem, and didn’t just want to go get a kind of queasy Republican-lite character, you might turn to. I think a lot of the people mentioned would fit the bill: I would trust creative people before policy wonks or experts, when it comes to this kind of challenge, for example.
Joss Whedon. Ron Moore. Aaron Sorkin.
Richard Posner, although he’d be surprised to hear it.
Whedon’s definitely on my list. Moore I think should be. Sorkin. Hm. Not so sure.
Well, since no one has mentioned these two, I would throw out Richard Rodriguez and Joan Didion, two writers whose work I have found deeply influential in my own thinking (especially if you’re familiar with her oeuvre, “The Year of Magical Thinking” is quite effecting). Also, I would say Lewis Lapham, although he seems to have gone a bit off the deep-end lately in his editorials in Harper’s, “Waiting for the Barbarians” is brilliant.
How about Simon Cowell? Not American. Very low brow. But someone who make have “the pulse of the American people”.