Pioneering author dies
Tom Wolfe, who chronicled American culture from the Merry Pranksters through the space race before turning his satiric wit to such novels as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” died at 88.
NEW YORK — Tom Wolfe, the white-suited wizard of new journalism who exuberantly chronicled American culture from the Merry Pranksters through the space race before turning his satiric wit to such novels as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” has died. He was 88.
Wolfe’s literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, said he died of an infection Monday in a New York City hospital.
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. Along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, 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 the “Me Generation,” defining the self-absorbed baby boomers of the 1970s.
“He was an incredible writer,” Talese told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “And you couldn’t imitate him. When people tried, it was a disaster.”
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping novel about contemporary New York, and he ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
In 1978, Wolfe married Sheila Berger, art director of Harper’s magazine. They had two children, Alexandra and Tommy.
As Wolfe helped define it, new journalism combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style.
“She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way,” he wrote in a typical piece, describing actress-socialite Baby Jane Holzer. “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened — swock! — like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of zebra! Those motherless stripes!”
Wolfe had many detractors, including fellow writers Norman Mailer and John Updike and critic James Wood, who panned Wolfe’s “big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration.” But his fans included millions of book buyers, literary critics and fellow authors.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born in Richmond, Va. He attended Washington and Lee University and began his journalism career as a reporter at the Springfield Union in Massachusetts in 1957. But it wasn’t until the mid-1960s, while a magazine writer for New York and Esquire, that his work made him a trendsetter.
His first book appeared in 1965: “The KandyKolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of 23 Wolfe articles that included the title piece, his seminal work on custom cars. Wolfe traveled during the ’60s with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for his book on the psychedelic culture, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” “The Right Stuff ” was a 1979 book about test pilot Chuck Yeager and the Mercury astronauts.
His work broke countless rules but was grounded in old-school journalism.
“Nothing fuels the imagination more than real facts do,” Wolfe told the AP in 1999. “As the saying goes, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.’ ”