Ben Fountain ’80 received the 2024 Thomas Wolfe Prize during an event held at Moeser Auditorium and hosted by the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The award recognizes contemporary writers with distinguished bodies of work.
Fountain is the author of two novels, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and “Devil Makes Three,” as well as a collection of short stories and a nonfiction book about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His works have received numerous awards including the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Delivering the Thomas Wolfe Lecture as part of the award ceremony, Fountain urged North Carolinians to invest boldly in liberal arts education, saying it would create prosperity. Recalling his childhood in rural North Carolina in the 1960s, Fountain said that the sight of a luxury car was “a big deal” in a small town. That began to change, he said, as a succession of state leaders, both Democratic and Republican, committed to robust funding of public education and created extensive university and community college systems.
“It’s to North Carolina’s great credit that over time its education system became dedicated to democratizing this privilege [of liberal arts education], to opening the best thought and the highest art to anyone who wanted access to them,” Fountain said. “Underlying all this was a generous, fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. We had faith in the culture that would result from the full and honest use of our intellects, our imaginations, our aptitudes and affinities.”
A native of North Carolina, Fountain attended law school at Duke University after graduating from Carolina. He worked at a law firm in Dallas, Texas, for five years before quitting his job to pursue writing. “I realized I was never gonna have any peace in myself if I didn’t try to [write],” he shared in response to an audience member’s question. “I guess it was a really powerful thing in me, that I felt like I would be living a false life.”
Fountain’s debut novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” is set almost entirely during a halftime of a Dallas Cowboys game amid a ceremony to honor troops who had fought in Iraq. Asked about his decision to have the novel unfold during such a short period of time, Fountain said he was determined to maintain simplicity.
“That was basically me trying not to screw it up,” Fountain said. “I had two failed novels in the drawer by then. What I was doing was too complex for my abilities. It was like ‘War and Peace’ jammed together with ‘Gone with the Wind.’”
He shared NASCAR legend Richard Petty’s advice to his son, Kyle, to “win the race as slow as you can.”
“So my mantra became, ‘write the story as simple as you can,’” he said. “Make it as complex as it needs to be but no more complex than that.”
The Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lecture honor the memory of famed author and Carolina alumnus Thomas Clayton Wolfe, who graduated in 1920. Established in 1999 with an endowed gift, the program seeks to give University students and the surrounding community the opportunity to hear important writers of their time. Past recipients include Lee Smith, Pat Conroy and Frank Bruni ’86.
Photo credit: Thorne Anderson
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