The Daily Telegraph

Top 5 Tom Wolfe books

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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (1968)

The pioneer of New Journalism stubbornly kept on his threepiece suit for this trip across America with LSD evangelist Ken Kesey in a bus daubed in psychedeli­c colours.

Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

“Radical chic” entered the lexicon after Wolfe’s article about a fashionabl­e New York party given for the Black Panthers by the conductor Leonard Bernstein.

The Right Stuff (1979)

Wolfe’s study of what it took – mentally and physically – to become a military test pilot or an astronaut was made in 1987 into a critically acclaimed but commercial­ly disastrous film.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)

Wolfe’s first blockbuste­r, a satirical thriller about New York Eighties excess, is captured in its snappy, recurring motifs: “Yale chin”, “bucket seat”, “perfect breasts”.

A Man in Full (1998)

It took Wolfe 11 years to follow The Bonfire of the Vanities with a second novel, which remained in its shadow. It’s a souped-up tale of privilege and race in Atlanta – Norman Mailer compared reading it to “making love to a 300-pound woman… Fall in love, or be asphyxiate­d.”

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