Author was a stylist through and through
Author Tom Wolfe, who immortalized America’s astronauts in “The Right Stuff,” died Monday in a Manhattan hospital, his agent, Lynn Nesbit, told USA TODAY. He was 88.
Wolfe’s best-sellers over the years include “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” He was also 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 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.
An acolyte of French novelist Emile Zola and other authors of “realistic” fiction, the stylishly-attired Wolfe was an American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it. He helped demonstrate that journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
His hyperbolic, stylized writing work was a gleeful fusillade of exclamation points, italics and improbable words. An ingenious phrase maker, he helped brand such expressions as “radical chic” for rich liberals’ fascination with revolutionaries.
Wolfe was a memorable stylist not just in words, but in his wardrobe. He had a penchant for white threepiece suits and top hats that eschewed the usual sloppy journalist’s style.
Or, as Wolfe put it: “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”