ABSTRACT
In 1968, Tom Wolfe immortalized the Southern California teenage surf scene while linking it to what he saw as essential in sixties culture. The Pump House Gang,2 named after its fi rst and most famous essay on surf culture in La Jolla, California, was a depiction of the many “statuspheres” that, for Wolfe, were transforming the face of American culture. According to the author, people today were ignoring the old “utopianisms” whereby the culture of the “happy worker” would be determined by the (essentially dull, socialist) communitarians who envisioned the future, and were instead creating their own little paradises. The masses were not only rejecting these old utopian standards, but all standards derived from the “community,” period. “What an intriguing thought,” Wolfe writes in the book’s introduction, “for a man to take his new riches and free time and his machines and split from communitas and start his own league. He will still have status competition-but he invents the rules . . . all sorts of outlaws and outcasts, by necessity or by choice” have done this before, but “the intriguing thing today . . . is that so many Americans and Englishmen of middle and lower incomes are now doing the same thing. Not out of ‘rebellion’ or ‘alienation’—they just want to be happy winners for a change.”3
