John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. He writes for GQ, Harper's Magazine, and Oxford American, and is the author of Blood Horses (2004) and Pulphead (2011). Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Blood HorsesNotes of a Sportswriter’s Son
When the gates fly open the horses are like a freak storm moving over the track together, their legs attended by a cloud of dust that they trail behind them, their jockeys’ colors flashing kaleidoscopically in the sunlight. The loudness of their pounding takes me by surprise. It overwhelms even the crowd. I am so stunned by the sight of them that by the time I collect myself, they have disappeared around the turn. We who are sitting close to the wire stand there listening to the call, waiting for them to reappear.
Blood Horses:Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son -
Blood HorsesNotes of a Sportswriter’s Son
A little under a million years ago, the old Atlantic land bridge having receded and a new one having formed over the Bering Strait, this thing, which was now a specimen we would recognize, found its way over—opposite to the way we came—and colonized Europe and Asia: herds of wild horses, alpha stallions with their harems of mares, “bachelor bands” of subdominant males, moving like wind patterns across the steppes and the plains. They had become ungulates—mono-toed, hooved—and they had become fast, faster than anything on the solid earth apart from the cats, and the cats could maintain their speed for only a few hundred yards or so, whereas this creature could run from morning to night.
Blood Horses:Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son -
Blood HorsesNotes of a Sportswriter’s Son
So many horses had died in World War I that some voiced fears for the global equine population: numbers had dipped low enough that a single epidemic might put the species within range of extinction. Field Marshal Haig, not convinced by the tends of thousands of men he had watched ride to their deaths, was still arguing in 1926 for the “value” of the horse in war, writing that “as time goes on, you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you ever have done in the past,” but by the time World War II broke out, even the old fops had accepted the fact that tanks, planes, and machine guns made cavalry tactics untenable.
Blood Horses:Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son
“Sullivan seems able to do almost anything, to work in any register, and not just within a single piece but often in the span of a single paragraph . . . Pulphead is the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again . . . Sullivan’s writing is a bizarrely coherent, novel, and generous pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[The essays in Pulphead are] among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years . . . What they have in common, though, whether low or high of brow, is their author's essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects' and his own foibles . . . a collection that shows why Sullivan might be the best magazine writer around.” —NPR
"A splendid account of [the] Triple Crown . . . In horses' beauty and power, and with their hint of danger even when schooled, Sullivan senses a restoration of what has been lost to us." —The New York Times [on Blood Horses]
Selected Works
