Wolfe’s works celebrated space pioneers, skewered the rich and pompous
Author Tom Wolfe, who immortalized America’s astronauts in “The Right Stuff,” died in a Manhattan hospital on Monday, his agent, Lynn Nesbit, told USA TODAY.
He was 87. His many bestsellers over the years include “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Electric KoolAid Acid Test.”
Wolfe was a pioneer practitioner of The New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s, a form of journalism that used literary conventions to tell stories in a colorful, “gonzo” form. Wolfe also coined the influential phrase “The Me Decade,” to reflect Americans’ obsession in the 1970s with self-fulfillment, in his essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”
Wolfe continued to write into his 80s: In 2016, he published “The Kingdom of Speech,” a nonfiction book that made the case that speech, not evolution, is responsible for mankind’s achievements.
But his two best-known books are the nonfiction title “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, and his first novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” released in 1987 to critical acclaim. Both became movies.
Wolfe wrote several more novels after “Bonfire.” In “A Man in Full” (1998), a No. 1 USA TODAY bestseller, he moved the action to Atlanta but continued with his favorite themes of racism and male ennui in the story of a college football star turned real-estate developer.
In “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004), he focused his keen eye on college campuses, through the eyes of his central character.
In 2012, Wolfe published his fourth, and it turned out, final novel, “Back to Blood,” set in Miami and again dealing with wealth, class divisions and status.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Wolfe, then 81, said he had no plans to retire: “The great thing about being a writer is that they can’t fire you. They can stop publishing your stuff, but so far that hasn’t happened.”