Author Tom Wolfe remembered as ‘magician’ with words
NEW YORK — You only had to look at him — in his white suits and two-tone shoes — or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other.
“He was a magician,” Wolfe’s friend and fellow “New Journalist” Gay Talese told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “He would take a sentence and work that sentence in loops and do all kinds of things with words. He’d take you out for a spin and after a while you’d wonder if he knew where he was headed. But he always knew exactly where he was headed.”
Wolfe, who died Monday at age 88, was a rule-breaker and traditionalist and a man of other contradictions. He mingled happily with hippies and published in Rolling Stone, but was a supporter of Ronald Reagan and otherwise old-fashioned in his tastes. He mocked the insular nature of American fiction, but was gracious in person, making a point before literary luncheons of reading the works of his fellow guests.
In recent years, he was badly stooped, but still stylish as he moved about with the help of a high cane with a wolf ’s head on top. Ever curious and energetic, he had figured out the world long before.
Whether sending up the New York art scene or hanging out with acid heads, Wolfe inevitably presented man as a status-seeking animal, concerned above all about the opinion of his peers. Wolfe himself dressed for company — his trademark a pale three-piece suit, impossibly high shirt collar, two-tone shoes and a silk tie.
And he acknowledged that he cared — very much — about his reputation.
“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,” Wolfe, who lived in a 12-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told the AP in 2012.
Wolfe’s legacy was tangible to countless newspaper and magazine writers. As he helped define it, the “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 overthe-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
“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!”
He enjoyed the highest commercial and critical rewards. His literary honors included the American Book Award (now called the National Book Award) for The Right Stuff and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle prize for The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of the top 10 selling books of the 1980s. Wolfe satirized college misbehavior in IAm
Charlotte Simmons and was still at it in his 80s with Back to Blood, a sprawling, multicultural story of sex and honor set in Miami.