New Journalism pioneer who wrote Bonfire of the Vanities

A pioneer of the New Journalism movement, as famous for his dapper dress sense as his wild, lavishly punctuated prose, Tom Wolfe showed America how it lives, said The Times: he introduced the world to the hippy counterculture in the 1960s and was a shrewd observer of the cultural trends of the 1970s – the “me decade”, as he called it. His aim, he said, was to create a nonfiction form that would be so captivating, it would render novels obsolete – and yet in the 1980s, he turned his hand to fiction. The result was The Bonfire of the Vanities, a sweeping satire about New York’s social and racial divide in that excessive decade. Recounting the downfall of a Wall Street trader and self-styled “master of the universe”, it is often described as the quintessential novel of the 1980s.

With his pale three-piece suits, high-collared shirts, two-tone shoes and snap-brimmed fedoras, Wolfe, who has died aged 88, was an instantly recognisable figure on the streets of Manhattan. He called his style “neo-pretentious”. He also said that he’d found it was no use him trying to blend in on his various reporting assignments, so instead he presented himself as the “man from Mars who simply wants to know”. But for all his apparent eccentricity, his background was conventional, his childhood happy. He was born in 1930 into a wealthy family in Richmond, Virginia. His father was a landowner and the editor of a farming journal; it was his mother who encouraged him to write. By the age of nine, he’d tried writing biographies of Mozart (in comic form) and Napoleon. In college, he edited a literary journal, and played baseball: a talented pitcher, he tried out for the New York Giants.

After gaining a doctorate at Yale, he worked for a local paper in Springfield, Massachusetts, before landing in Manhattan, with a job at the Herald Tribune. During a newspaper strike in 1963, he was sent by Esquire to cover a convention of car customisers in LA. He couldn’t get the piece written and, running out of time, submitted his notes to the editor in memo form. He assumed a staffer would knock them into shape. Instead, the editor simply

published the memo as it was, peppered with exclamation marks, ellipsis, italics and words in capitals. The essay would later become the title piece for his bestselling collection The KandyKolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby (1965). Soon after that, he joined Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on an Lsd-fuelled trip around America on a bus named Furthur for a series of essays that became The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (1968). Although he called his work “saturation reporting”, Wolfe was always only an observer: he did not take acid himself, nor accept Kesey’s invitation to put down his notepad and “just Be Here”.

In 1970, he turned his attention to the pretensions of New York liberals with Radical Chic, a send-up of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers hosted by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. But arguably his finest non-fiction work was his most sober: The Right Stuff (1979) is an account of the early US space programme and the test pilots who became the first astronauts. It was turned into an Oscar-winning film, and brought another phrase into the vernacular (the “right stuff” being the kind of courage the pilots had to have). Later, he wrote books ridiculing contemporary art and architecture – which were not universally well received. In a review of 1981’s From Bauhaus to Our House, Michael Sorkin wrote: “What Tom Wolfe doesn’t know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so indeed it has.” He followed up The Bonfire of the Vanities with another epic novel. A Man in Full (1998), set in Atlanta, sold well, but was attacked by John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving, who dismissed it as mere entertainment. Wolfe, who’d received a $7m advance, reacted in kind, referring to the first two as “piles of old bones” and the trio as “My Three Stooges”.

Although his contemporaries in New Journalism included the likes of the pistol-waving Hunter S. Thompson and the abusive womaniser Mailer, Wolfe prized his good southern manners, said The Washington Post, and after marrying Sheila Berger, in 1978, he embraced fatherhood with surprised delight. Rather than resenting his children’s interruptions, he welcomed them.