Chronicler of the vanities
It was Wednesday afternoon when my phone beeped to inform me of a notification from the New York Times. One of those annoyingly regular things you receive constantly on your phone in the digital age — intended to get you to click through to waste one of your assigned number of free articles for the month only to find yourself scanning yet another story about yet another potentially world-threatening debacle created by the US president’s erratic early-morning Twitter outbursts. This notification was different — Tom Wolfe, master of the “neon-lit electric prose” dispatch, whip-smart dissector of subcultures and the status anxieties of four of the most tumultuous decades in American life, spearheader of the New Journalism, which changed magazine writing forever, staunch adherent of the Southern Dandy white bespoke threepiece suit, watch and fob, spats and cane — had gone off to join the great Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in the sky.
The internet immediately blew up with analyses of Wolfe’s contribution to American and world letters, the terms he coined that became part of the lexicon, the merits of his fiction versus his nonfiction and of course his singular sartorial penchants — ever present on the jackets of his books from his first collection of nonfiction, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, published in 1965, to his final book, The Kingdom of Speech, a critique of the theories of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, published in 2016.
Born in 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe jnr was the only son of a garden designer mother and an agronomist father and spent his childhood dreaming of becoming a professional baseball player, a dream that he pursued through his undergraduate years in college before enrolling at
Yale to obtain his PhD in American Studies. However, he always had ambitions of becoming a novelist and it was to this end that after graduation from Yale, Wolfe sent off letters of introduction to 120 newspapers across the US, believing that journalism would allow him to earn money writing while working after hours on his fiction.
The only newspaper that showed any interest “in this guy with a PhD from Yale who wanted to work on their paper” was the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Wolfe began his career as a general reporter, working there for three years before being hired to work on the city desk of the Washington Post in 1959.
Urban newsroom
While Wolfe’s idea of becoming a novelist seems to have quickly slipped away during this period, he was already beginning to embellish his reports with novelistic elements in the early incarnations of what would become the signature style that would see him change reportage so indelibly in the 1960s. What was needed to create the Wolfe persona, which we all know so well today, was the hubbub, clatter, quickwitted banter and drive of a large urban newsroom, and when he was hired by the New York Herald Tribune in 1962, Wolfe found both the work environment and city he had been craving — making the city his home and focus of some of his most memorable pieces until his death.
What Wolfe also found at the Tribune was the other thing that all great writers need, a great editor in the form of Clay Felker, the editor of the newspaper’s Sunday supplement. Felker was known for encouraging his writers to break the rules and push the boundaries of reporting in their stories and Wolfe took full advantage of his editor’s benevolence, quickly establishing a name for himself as one of the city’s sharpest observers and prose stylists — combining his novelistic ambitions with the sociological theories he’d studied at Yale.
During the 1962 New York newspaper strike, Wolfe approached Esquire magazine (much to Felker’s irritation) with a story about the hot-rod car culture in California. The resulting piece, which gave its title to his first published collection, came out of a panicked memo to Esquire editor Byron Dobell, written as a last-minute, night-before-deadline missive explaining what Wolfe hoped to say and why he couldn’t say it. Dobell removed the “Dear Byron” from the top and published the rest as the piece. Dobell also added the infamous headline: “There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM) that Kandy Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (RAHGHHHH) around the bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM)”. And the rest is journalism history.
By the time Wolfe co-edited the New Journalism collection with EW Johnson in 1973, which included pieces by Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer, he was a household name thanks in particular to his first fulllength book of reporting – 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the seminal account of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the origins of the hippy culture, and his 1970 double essay book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers — a wickedly cynical putdown of the desperate lengths to which America’s high society were willing to go in their efforts to identify with the life of the streets.
He would cement his reputation as the foremost proponent of the New Journalism’s combination of novelistic elements and detailed, immersive reporting with 1979’s The Right Stuff, a book that grew out of his curiosity as to “what is it . . . that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?”
Wolfe continued to write essays and publish collections through the following decades — coining the term the “Me Decade” to describe the selfobsession of the 1970s; throwing shade at the absurdities of the art world and the hideousness of modern architecture in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.
But it remained his ambition to write a novel — and one that he hoped would lead a new movement in American fiction away from the minutely observed, depressing social realist kitchen sink drama and towards a grand, sweeping, multi-character, multiclass examination of society as a whole in the vein of the works of 19th-century novelists such as Charles Dickens and Émile Zola. The resulting book, published in 1987, is considered by many to be the apex of Wolfe’s career.
Fiction gatekeepers
The Bonfire of the Vanities combined Wolfe’s expert observational talents with a masterly social dissection of the follies and hubris of wealth-obsessed New York in the 1980s. Although some may argue that its overworked and slightly incredible ending lets it down, it’s still the closest that Wolfe got to achieving his big-picture fiction ambitions, and stands as a modern masterwork of American fiction.
It provided a template for Wolfe’s further three novels – A Man in Full, I am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood — but its particular meeting of the right writer in the right place at the right time was one that he was never able to satisfactorily recreate — much to the annoyance of former travellers and American fiction gatekeepers such as Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, who Wolfe famously dubbed, perhaps somewhat churlishly, “the three stooges” after the trio penned scathing reviews of his second novel, A Man in Full.
Whatever his failings as a novelist, there’s no doubt that Wolfe left a noticeable mark on nonfiction feature writing that has changed it forever and inspired generations of budding writers to follow in his footsteps, turning the reading of fact into something that gives as much and sometimes more pleasure than fiction.
He may have gone but he is certainly not forgotten and if there’s any justice in the world, he’ll be buried in one of his 40 bespoke three-piece white suits, watch and fob carefully placed, an ornately carved ivory cane in one hand, a copy of The Right Stuff in the other and a knowing smile forever etched across his lips as he watches and wonders where we might go next and how best to tell Norman Mailer and Hunter S Thompson about the sheer OMG facepalming absurdity of the world they’ve left behind.
Whatever his failings as a novelist, there’s no doubt that Wolfe left a noticeable mark on nonfiction feature writing that has changed it forever