Writer Tom Wolfe dies at 88
Author of ‘The Right Stuff,’ ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose Technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s monied status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,”
“The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died Monday in a New York City hospital. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously 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 recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, stillboyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke 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 getup, Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”
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 creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.
“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ fifty-seven times.” William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skilful 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 with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they 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 sixties hipster subculture,” press critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.
Even more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his exhaustively reported narrative about the first U.S. astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book was adapted into a film in 1983 with Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language.
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.” The novel, which initially ran as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and was published in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.