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John Jeremiah Sullivan on Pulphead
Sullivan discusses the essays in Pulphead and how teen and pop culture inform his writing.
Quick facts
Memoir · Nature
Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son
Sullivan’s debut interweaves an elegy for his father, longtime sportswriter Mike Sullivan, with a sprawling investigation into the history and culture of the Thoroughbred racehorse, prompted by his father’s offhand answer to what he remembered best from thirty years in the press box: watching Secretariat win the 1973 Derby.
Winner of a National Magazine Award and a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, Blood Horses is a stranger and more ambitious book than its subject matter suggests — part memoir, part natural history, part meditation on why humans and horses have stayed bound together for millennia. It’s the clearest evidence that Sullivan’s essay style, wandering but purposeful, was fully formed before Pulphead made him famous.
EssaysOn my shelf
Pulphead: Essays
A collection of fourteen magazine pieces, substantially reworked from their original publications, ranging from a Christian rock festival to the Tea Party movement to living with the elderly Southern Agrarian writer Andrew Nelson Lytle to profiles of Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, and Bunny Wailer. The pieces are unified less by subject than by Sullivan’s restless, digressive curiosity.
Pulphead was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Time Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2011, and the comparisons to David Foster Wallace’s essay collections were immediate and largely earned: Sullivan can shift from erudite to vernacular within a single paragraph, and his essay ‘Mister Lytle’ won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize on its own. This is the book that made him one of the defining magazine writers of his generation.
Frequently asked questions about John Jeremiah Sullivan’s books
From the bookshelf
“This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.”
— John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead
For more essayists whose curiosity refuses to stay inside one subject, browse the full shelf.
