Bonfire Of The Vanities author dies at 88
THE literary world is mourning the loss of Tom Wolfe, the acerbic, dapper writer whose novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities skewered his fellow Americans’ greed and racism.
Wolfe died in Manhattan on Monday, aged 88, after being hospitalised with an infection, his agent said.
In a long journalistic and literary career, in which he became one of America’s most colourful writers, Wolfe also won acclaim for The Right Stuff, his exhaustively researched book about the first US astronauts in the Mercury space programme.
The book was made into an Oscar-winning 1983 film starring Ed Harris, Sam Shepard and Dennis Quaid and its title became an enduring phrase. ‘Radical Chic’ was another phrase coined by the irrepressible Wolfe.
Another of his much-loved works of nonfiction was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a colourful account of a drug-fuelled bus journey across the US by hippie Ken Kesey, an early exponent of the virtues of LSD, and a band of followers who called themselves the Merry Pranksters.
The Bonfire Of The Vanities, his first novel, was published in 1987. It was one of the biggest-selling books of the 1980s. The satire’s main character, smug stockbroker Sherman McCoy, boasts of being a ‘Master of the Universe’ until he one night takes a wrong turn while driving through the Bronx with his mistress and runs over a black man.
It was turned into a 1990 film starring Tom Hanks as McCoy, Kim Cattrall as his wife, Melanie Griffith as his mistress and Bruce Willis as a boozy journalist. Wolfe was a pioneer of a literary style of the 1960s and 1970s known as New Journalism, which used fiction writing techniques, such as long and detailed descriptions, in non-fiction.
Wolfe had myriad admirers but he also had no shortage of critics among novelists, who sniffed that he was just a jumped-up journalist.
The writer Norman Mailer once wrote of the ‘uncomfortable possibility’ that Wolfe ‘might yet be seen as our best writer’, calling him ‘the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned’.
Wolfe put such attacks down to jealousy, which must have annoyed his critics even more. Married with two children, Wolfe suffered a heart attack at his gym in 1996 and had to undergo quintuple bypass surgery.
His health problems brought on a period of severe depression.