Leisure

The Book That Changed My Life

by P.J. O'Rourke
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 5:14:53 PM ]

For me, it wasn’t really any one book. It was the whole movement in the late ’60s of the New Journalism. Probably Tom Wolfe was most influential in a way. In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he proved that you could be very funny about serious topics. He’s a genius, but not primarily a comic genius. That was some sort of epiphany for me, coming out of the very solemn and middlebrow ’50s, that humor was a tool you could use on various extremely unfunny things. That mental breakthrough led me to do what I’ve been doing for the rest of my life.  • I was in college when it came out. It was the energy of the writing that hit me. Up until the advent of the New Journalists—and Wolfe was head and shoulders the best of them—there was a cut-and-dried AP and UPI style of prose journalism. It was written by the yard in some ways, and it was interesting or uninteresting only according to the information it contained. It was local tornado damage or something. I wanted to be a novelist and a poet, and despite the fact that I had absolutely no talent in that department, I was beavering away at some incomprehensible novel—something that would make Finnegans Wake look like an easy evening’s read—and poems that were yet more incomprehensible. Like many people my age, I was temporarily overinfluenced by Tom Wolfe. It was like somebody put some Krazy Glue on the exclamation-mark key. I was whacking on all those symbols that are over the numbers on a typewriter keyboard. But you get over it.  • If I hadn’t gotten the idea that you could do things that were, for lack of a better word, creative—if journalism didn’t offer the chance to build something new—I probably would have pursued some other line of business. And I would be richer and happier today. My family in Ohio had a car dealership. Maybe if I’d had the sense to get into Toyotas early on, it would be a different world. Maybe not a different world, but a different world for me. I’d have a boat. But it would be a boat on Lake Erie.

P.J. O'Rourke's latest book, On the Wealth of Nations, is published by Grove Press.