Giant of American literature dies
Novelist and pioneer of New Journalism Tom Wolfe remembered as ‘a singular talent’
Tom Wolfe loved
American culture for all its excess. Groupies, doormen, hippies, astronauts, bankers and frat boys took on a magisterial presence in his writing, and if there was a hint of hypocrisy in their actions, then all the better.
Wolfe reveled in worlds where people stood tall and acted with extravagance and swagger. He often joined the parade himself, authorturned-celebrity in his cream-colored suit, walking stick in hand.
Fervent disciple — if not the high priest — of New Journalism, he brought to his stories techniques often reserved for fiction and dispensed candid and often droll commentary on the obsessions and passing trends of American society. The author of 15 books, fiction and nonfiction, Wolfe is credited with such phrases as “radical chic,” “the me decade” and “the right stuff.”
Kurt Vonnegut considered him a genius. Mary Gordon called him a thinking man’s redneck. The novelist John Gregory Dunne observed that his writings have the capacity “to drive otherwise sane and sensible people clear around the bend.”
Once asked why critics despised him, Wolfe said, “Intellectuals aren’t used to being written about. When they aren’t taken seriously and become part of the human comedy, they have a tendency to squeal like weenies over an open fire.”
One of the most conspicuous voices in American letters, Wolfe died Monday at a Manhattan hospital, according to his agent, Lynn Nesbit. He was 88. He had been hospitalized with an infection, according to the Guardian.
“Tom was a singular talent,” his friend Gay
Talese said. “He was an extraordinarily active reporter whose unique prose was supported on a foundation of solid research.”
Often considered a satirist for his broadly drawn portraits, Wolfe saw himself as a realist and supported the claim with his reporting. “Every kind of writer,” he once proclaimed, “should get away from the desk and see things they don’t know about.”
Wolfe got his start in 1963 with a story that he almost couldn’t write. He had gone to California to report on renegade car designers working out of garages in Burbank and Lynwood. After racking up a $750 tab at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he returned to New York and stared at his typewriter, unable to find the right words.
As the deadline neared, he typed up his notes for his editor who planned to reassign the story to another writer. Ten hours and 49 pages later, Wolfe had “The Kandy-kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby.”
In 1965, the story became a centerpiece for a collection of essays that established his national reputation as a writer who didn’t use the English language so much as he detonated it. Allusions, dramatic asides, neologisms and flamboyant punctuation became the hallmarks of his style.
“What Tom did with words is what French Impressionists did with color,” said Larry Dietz, editor and friend.
A disciplined writer, Wolfe held himself to a quota of 10 triple-spaced pages a day, but writing was never fun for Wolfe. “It’s the hardest work in the world,” he said. “The only thing that will get you through it is maybe someone will applaud when it’s over.”
New Journalism
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe
Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 1930. Magnolia-lined streets, his neighbors’ accent and his mother’s mint tea gave his childhood a genteel, decidedly Southern air.
Wolfe’s mother was a landscape designer, and his father was an agronomist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and an editor for an agricultural magazine. Watching his father work — seeing scribbled notes on a legal pad transformed into pristine type on the page — sparked Wolfe’s ambition to be a writer.
At Washington and Lee University, he helped edit the campus newspaper and co-founded its literary quarterly.
He received a doctorate from Yale in 1957 in American Studies, and after sending out applications to 53 newspapers, took a job as a reporter for the Springfield Union in Massachusetts.
The most difficult phone call he ever made, he said, was to let his father know that instead of becoming a professor, he was going to be a reporter.
He told an interviewer that he enjoyed “the cowboy nature of journalism, the idea that it wasn’t really respectable, and yet it was exciting, even in a literary way.”
After three years in Massachusetts and two years with The Washington Post, he headed to the
New York Herald Tribune, where he would show up each day in a $200 creamcolored suit, which he wore as “a harmless form of aggression” against New Yorkers unaccustomed to seeing lighter shades worn during winter.
Once asked to describe the ensemble, he called it “neo-pretentious,” but he also discovered the style had an advantage. “If people see that you are an outsider,” he said, “they will come up and tell you things.”
Writing for the Tribune’s Sunday magazine, Wolfe dressed up his stories with scenes, dialogue and a raucous point of view that soon distinguished the New Journalism, a phrase credited to writer Pete Hamill and whose practitioners included Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Talese.
“I had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I was doing things no one had ever done in journalism,” Wolfe said.
‘Contrarian and a cynic’
As much as the words themselves, Wolfe’s perspective caught the attention of readers and critics. At a time when Vietnam cast a shadow across American life, he discovered something bright in stories about stock cars, Cassius Clay, Hugh Hefner, and the club scene in London.
“Whatstruckme…was that so many people have found such novel ways of doing just that, enjoying, extending their ego way out on the best terms available, namely their own,” he said.
Wolfe’s amazement, however, could strike a withering tone, such as the time he invited himself to a cocktail party held for the Black Panthers in the Park Avenue penthouse of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia.
The year was 1970, and the gathering was a fundraiser for members of the party who had been held in prison for nine months without trial. In “The Radical Chic,” Wolfe savaged the evening with a portrait of the fashionably liberal crowd engaging with militants over canapes.
The story brought to light the conservative side to Wolfe’s politics.
“He had this kind of cynicism about liberalism,” writer and friend Ann Louise Bardach said. “If you look at what upset Tom, it was the card-carrying, raving, bring-down-the-barricade liberalism, but more than that, he was contrarian and a cynic in the sense that every great reporter is.”
Coming off the success of his ambitious and lucrative portrait of the space program, “The Right Stuff,” which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie, Wolfe turned from journalism to fiction. Having attacked contemporary novelists for their limited ambitions, he felt it only fair that he try the form himself.
His first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” was serialized in Rolling Stone. A sprawling portrait of New York City in the 1980s, it became a best-seller in 1986.
“Here was a writer who stuck his neck out, criticizing fiction writers and their work,” Talese said. “Then he goes ahead and writes a novel. He knows he will get killed critically because everyone in the literary establishment will have it in for him.”
Wolfe had his revenge, as Talese points out, when his books became best-sellers.