Top 5 Tom Wolfe books
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.”