SOURCE: “Tom Wolfe and The ‘Experimental’ Novel,” in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 31–34.

In the following essay, Card discusses Wolfe's development of the social-realist novel and his belief that highly-detailed realism is “the future of the fictional novel.”

Tom Wolfe's essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (subtitled “A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel”)¹ urging American writers to produce novels that will convey a sense to readers of what life is truly like in “the American century” (i.e. the Twentieth century) through “a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him” has its counterpart in “Le Roman expérimental” (“The Experimental Novel”) set forth in 1880 by a writer whom Wolfe admires, Emile Zola.

Zola's essay was a manifesto for the scientific novel or, more accurately, for the...