An inspiration for a generation of writers
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 revelled in worlds where people stood tall and acted with extravagance. He often joined the parade himself, authorturnedcelebrity in his cream 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 medecade’’ and ‘‘the right stuff’’.
Kurt Vonnegut considered him a genius. Mary Gordon called him a thinking man’s redneck. Surfers in La Jolla labelled him a dork after he profiled them. 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 on Monday at a Manhattan hospital aged 87.
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.’’
‘‘Tom had an extraordinarily sharp eye and a commitment to tell the truth,’’ said Jann Wenner, friend and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine. ‘‘He didn’t write out of malice. He went to the essence of the matter and called it like he saw it.’’
His pen may have been caustic, but Wolfe in person was unfailingly courteous, according to Pat Strachan, senior editor at Little, Brown who worked with him since the late 1970s.
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 $US750 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 KandyKolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby.
In 1965, the story became a centrepiece 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.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe jun was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 1931. Magnolialined streets, his neighbours’ accent and his mother’s mint tea gave his childhood a genteel, decidedly Southern air. His grandfather had been a rifleman for the Confederacy.
Wolfe claimed that as a child, he would thank God at night for being born in the greatest city in the greatest state in the greatest country in the world.
Wolfe’s mother was a landscape designer, and his father was an agronomist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and an editor for an agricultural magazine.
At Washington and Lee University, he helped edit the campus newspaper and cofounded 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.
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 $US200 creamcoloured 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 ‘‘neopretentious’’, but he 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.
His style would inspire a generation of writers.
‘‘He had this kind of cynicism about liberalism,’’ says writer and friend Ann Louise Bardach. ‘‘If you look at what upset Tom, it was the cardcarrying, raving, bringdownthebarricade liberalism, but more than that, he was contrarian and a cynic in the sense that every great reporter is.’’
He later attended a state dinner at the White House during the Reagan administration, supported President George W. Bush and complained against having to pay too much income tax. Walking the streets of New York, Wolfe would wear an American flag lapel pin that he likened to ‘‘holding up a cross to werewolves.’’
Single until he was 47, he met his future wife, Sheila Berger, at Harper’s magazine where she was an art director. They married in 1978, and had two children.
Coming off the success of his ambitious and lucrative portrait of the space programme,, The Right Stuff, which was made into an Academy Awardwinning movie, Wolfe turned from journalism to fiction. The first of several novels was the bestselling The Bonfire of the Vanities.
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