Novelist Tom Wolfe dies at 88
TOM Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose Technicolor prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customisers, astronauts and Manhattan’s status-seekers in works like The Kandy-KoloredTangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities, died on Monday in a New York City hospital. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Wolfe had been hospitalised with an infection.
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the influential hybrid known as New Journalism.
But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognisable as he strolled down Madison Avenue – a tall, slender, blueeyed, still-boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious”.
It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which – like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” – became American idioms.
His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting and his use of pop language and explosive punctuation.
William F Buckley Jr, writing in National Review, put it simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America – I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”
From 1965 to 1981, Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of his reportorial travels in California as he and friends spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account – fictional or non, in print or on film – of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture”, media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Even more impressive, to critics, was The Right Stuff, his exhaustively reported narrative about the first US astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983, made test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero.
After The Right Stuff, published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge – The Novel?”
The answer came with The Bonfire of the Vanities. Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.
For many years, Wolfe lived a relatively private life in his 12room apartment on the Upper East Side with his wife, Sheila (Berger) Wolfe, a graphic designer. She and their two children, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and Tommy Wolfe, a sculptor and furniture designer, survive him.
The eccentricities of his adult life were a far cry from the normalcy of his childhood, which by all accounts was a happy one.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr was born March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia. His father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, editor of the Southern Planter, an agricultural journal, and director of distribution for the Southern States Cooperative, which later became a Fortune 500 company. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, encouraged him to become an artist and gave him a love of reading.
Young Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.
He enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and received his doctorate in 1957. After sending out job applications to more than 100 newspapers and receiving three responses, two of them “no”, he went to work as a general-assignment reporter at the SpringfieldUnion inSpringfield, Massachusetts, and later joined the staff of the Washington Post. He was assigned to cover Latin America and in 1961 won an award for a series on Cuba.
In 1962, Wolfe joined the Herald Tribune as a reporter on the city desk, where he found his voice as a social chronicler. Fascinated by the status wars and shifting power bases of the city, he poured his energy and insatiable curiosity into his reporting and soon became one of the stars on the staff. The next year he began writing for New York, the newspaper’s newly revamped Sunday supplement, edited by Clay Felker.
“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age: the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (1986).
Those were heady days for journalists. Wolfe became one of the standard-bearers of New Journalism, along with Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion and others. Most were represented in The New Journalism (1973), an anthology he edited with EW Johnson.
In a statement for the reference work World Authors, Wolfe wrote that to him the term “meant writing nonfiction, from newspaper stories to books, using basic reporting to gather the material but techniques ordinarily associated with fiction, such as scene-by-scene construction, to narrate it”.
Wolfe’s later novels earned mixed reviews. Many critics found I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), about a naïve freshman’s disillusioning experiences at college fuelled by sex and alcohol, unconvincing. In Back to Blood (2012), Wolfe created one of his most sympathetic, multidimensional characters in Nestor Camacho, a young Cuban-American police officer trying to navigate the treacherous waters of multiethnic Miami.
In the end it was his ear – acute, finely tuned – that served him best and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his considerable writing talent.