Tom Wolfe

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Thomas Kennerly Wolfe (born March 2, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia), known as Tom Wolfe, is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Education 1.2 Journalism and New Journalism 1.3 Non-fiction books 1.4 Novels 2 Trivia 3 Bibliography 3.1 Fiction 3.2 Non-fiction 4 Footnotes 5 References 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Education

Wolfe graduated from the Episcopalian St. Christopher's School in Richmond before attending Washington and Lee University as an undergraduate, where he majored in English. He went on to graduate from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.^[1][2]

[edit] Journalism and New Journalism

Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and eventually worked for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune among others. While there he experimented with using fictional techniques in feature stories^[3].

During a New York newspaper strike in 1963, he approached Esquire Magazine about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of Southern California. He struggled with writing the article and editor Byron Dobell suggested that Wolfe send his notes to him so they could work together on the article. Wolfe sat down and wrote Dobell a letter saying everything he wanted to say about the subject, ignoring all conventions of journalism. Dobell simply removed the salutation "Dear Byron" from the top of the letter and published the notes as the article. The result was The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.^[4]

This was what Wolfe called New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. One of the most striking examples of this idea is Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The book, while being a narrative account of the adventures of the Merry Pranksters, is also highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia, free association, and eccentric use of punctuation—such as multiple exclamation marks and italics—to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers.

In addition to his own forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe edited a collection of New Journalism with EW Johnson, published in 1973 and titled simply The New Journalism. This book brought together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and could be considered literature.

[edit] Non-fiction books

In 1965 a collection of his articles in this style was published under the title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Wolfe's fame grew. A second volume of articles, entitled The Pump House Gang, followed in 1968. He wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s was transformed as a result of post-WWII economic prosperity. His defining work from this era is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (published the same day as "The Pump House Gang"), which epitomized the decade of the 1960s for many. Although a conservative in many ways and certainly not a hippie, Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.

In 1970 he published two essays in book form with Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers: "These Radical Chic Evenings," a biting account of a party given by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party, and "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers," about the practice of using racial intimidation ("mau-mauing") to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers"). The phrase "radical chic" soon became a popular derogatory term for upper class leftism. In 1977, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine hit bookstores; embodying one of Wolfe's more famous essays, The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

In 1979 Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts. Famously following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he likened these heroes to "single combat champions" of a by-gone era, going forth to battle in the Space Race on behalf of their country. In 1983 the book was adapted as a successful feature film.

Wolfe also wrote two highly critical social histories of modern art and modern architecture, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus To Our House, in 1975 and 1981, respectively. "The Painted Word" mocked the excessive insularity of the art world and its dependence on faddish critical theory, while "From Bauhaus to Our House" explored the negative effects of the Bauhaus style on the evolution of modern architecture.

In 1984, Wolfe won the prestigious Dos Passos Prize for literature from Longwood University.

[edit] Novels

Several other books followed before Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was published in 1987 after having previously been serialized in Rolling Stone magazine. This book chronicles the spectacular fall of a successful New York bond trader named Sherman McCoy against a backdrop of 1980s New York. Critics praised the book in particular for its vivid evocation of New York's social, racial, and economic tensions. It was a runaway popular success, becoming one of the bestselling and most widely talked about books of the 1980s. Wolfe received $5 million for the film rights to Bonfire of the Vanities, the most ever earned by an author at that time.

He followed this with a controversial 1989 essay in Harper's Magazine entitled Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, which criticized modern American novelists for failing to fully engage with their subjects, and suggested modern literature could be saved by a greater reliance on journalistic technique. This essay was seen as an attack on the mainstream literary establishment, and a boast that Wolfe's work was superior to more highly regarded authors.^[5]

Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread interest in his second work of fiction. This project took him more than eleven years to complete; A Man in Full was published finally in 1998. The book's reception was not universally positive, despite glowing reviews published in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. An enormous initial printing of 1.2 million copies was announced and the book stayed at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks. John Updike wrote a critical review for The New Yorker, in which he wrote that the novel "amounts to Entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." This touched off an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media between Wolfe and Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. Wolfe would later publish an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges."

After publishing Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella Ambush at Fort Bragg) in 2001, he followed up with his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), which chronicles the culture clash between a poor scholarship student from Appalachia and the class prejudice, materialism and sexual promiscuity she finds at a prestigious contemporary American university. The novel met with a mostly tepid response by critics. The book won praise, however, from many political conservatives who saw the book's disturbing account of college sexuality as revealing moral decline. The novel won a dubious award from the London-based Literary Review "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel," though the author later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical.

Wolfe has written that his goal in writing fiction is to document contemporary society, in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens and Zola.

[edit] Trivia

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