Through the eyes of a pure, small-town and brilliant freshman named Charlotte Simmons, readers are a given a view of university life thoroughly suffused with sex. While Wolfe did his research-visiting universities in preparation-reviewers have tended to agree that Wolfe’s portrayal is uneven at best. I Am Charlotte Simmons, however, has not invited Dickens comparisons. Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), had fit this model he outlined and had invited comparisons to Dickens (which continued with A Man in Full in 1998).

Wolfe has not been humble about his approach in a November 1989 Harper’s Magazine article, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” he compared himself to past luminaries ranging from Charles Dickens to Sinclair Lewis, all of whom, he maintained, recognized the importance of material not content to drawn upon the personal, these authors went into society as observers, and wrote about what they saw, not about their inner turmoil. And so my sympathies have lain with Wolfe’s efforts to “document” American life in a narrative style. For instance, I have assigned Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) to prompt discussion about day-to-day divisions within the Civil Rights Movement Walker reveals, in a way I cannot, the passions and tensions that consumed black and white young workers in the early Civil Rights Movement as they came into close contact and inevitably established romantic and sexual relationships in a highly politicized context.

history classes, I like to include novels as primary sources. Wolfe’s latest effort, I Am Charlotte Simmons, published in November 2004, attempts to document the present-day college experience. historian looking ahead for what will be the sources which had the most to say about United States culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Tom Wolfe’s belief in literary realism, in the “non-fiction novel” that lays bare before the public an unforgiving portrait of itself, is admittedly a very attractive notion. History, Emory University.Īs a post-1945 U.S. But little does she realise that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, status, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.Īs Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. A scandalous exploration of elite undergraduate life from the author of The Bonfire of the Vanitiesĭupont University: the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition.

I am charlotte simmons writer