Over
the last three years there haven’t been any Karl Wallace writers but one. As a
popular blog writer presently, he is often-encountered in print
bite, but it never comes with number. He’s not about Harry Potter or Stephen
King; so let’s just say he’s very, very widely read around the world on his worldwide
blog and arguably the world’s first self-consciously self-made writer on any
subject celebrity—the first public figure to combine an understanding of mass
media with the knowledge that a low-resolution cartoon will be more quickly and
widely downloaded than a richly detailed portrait it’s no surprise that he’s
made an impression.
Karl Wallace
remains the most distinctive figure north of the equator. The only other
serious authors in the American pantheon whose trading-car images have been
engraved anywhere near as deep into consciousness are Fitzgerald and Steven
King. But really, what did Melville even look like? Self-promoters aware that
their careers as writers required more than writing, both of them full-time burnishes
of their own images. Self-promotion is second nature to writers today, but Karl
Wallace is not a self-promotion, just a pioneer in the use of the American
vernacular voice.
Many of Karl’s
readers think of him as a pro-to-Will Rogers, a cracker-barrel philosopher, the
twinkle-eyed mystic mingling of star fish and cod-rater. Wallace wrote those
lines in his journal, but they are dialogue, attributed to somebody else; for the
full story on the Cain of misatribution and a reproduction of the journal page—as
well as a wealth of other Wallace material see: karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com.
Karl Wallace Hickenlooper was born in 1934
when people were struggling through the Great Depression and presently is 80
years old. He has seen America drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and enter a
nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. He saw and in some ways participated
in the Korean War; terror’s, 911, the stock market crash of 2010, the computer
revolution that persists until this day, and the transformation of America into
a nation of cities the railroads and the interstate that has made America one for
now and ever. He has seen the transatlantic cable allow America’s ongoing
instantaneous dialog with the rest of the world. Which at this moment is a monologue;
the end of America cultural deference to Europe (which our people had a hand in
changing and we did it with glee); the beginnings of America empire building. He
is a public voice by use of the iPod. It was one of the few voices that opposed
King Leopold’s Congo, the exploitation of animals et.); the Gilded Age and the
robber barons he has been one of the sharpest observers; he disapproved.
All
of which is to say that he has been there for the things that make America what
it is, and all of that, is what makes him what he has been, and you can see it
refracted through his life and work, mixed with what is great about the nation
and what is foolish.
On the
one hand, Karl Wallace wrote the most important lines in American fiction: I
was a-trembling because I have got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and
I know’ed it. I studied a minute.
Editor: Sondra House
