WOLFE, TOM
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe (March 2, 1931– ) was one of
America’s leading literary journalists and popular novelists in the second half of the twentieth century. A flamboyant stylist and satirical chronicler of American mores and
manners, he often focused on the pursuit of status, clashing
social stratums and what he perceived as the intellectual
poverty of liberal pieties. Along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Hunter S.
Thompson, Wolfe was one of the better-known members
of a loose-knit and influential school of American literature known as the New Journalism, a genre of non-fiction
writing that employed fiction devices, such as interior
monologue, long passages of dialogue, and shifting pointsof-view, with the traditional fact-gathering techniques of a
newspaper reporter. Writing in Harold Hayes’ Esquire and
Clay Felker’s New York magazines, Wolfe gained particular
attention as for his sharp-eyed coverage of the 1960s and
1970s’ colorful cultural landscape. Later, as a novelist, he
garnered fame—and a considerable fortune—limning the
excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s.
Wolfe, who is of no relation to the novelist Thomas Wolfe,
was born in Richmond, Virginia; his father was an agronomist and agriculture magazine editor; his mother quit medical school to stay at home and raise a family. Wolfe was
graduated from the prestigious St. Christopher’s School in
Richmond and, in 1951, from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Vorginia. He earned a PhD in American
studies at Yale University in 1957; his dissertation: “The
League of American Writers: Communist Organizational
Activity among American Writers, 1929–1942.”
While in graduate school, Wolfe took a position as a
general assignment reporter with the Springfi eld Union in
Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1959, he joined the Washington Post, where he was a general assignment reporter, feature writer, illustrator and foreign correspondent. In 1960,
he won the Newspaper Guild’s award for foreign reporting
for his coverage of the Cuban revolution. In 1962, he moved
to New York, where he worked for the New York HeraldTribune as a general assignment reporter and a writer for the
newspaper’s Sunday magazine, New York. During his first
year in New York, he also began freelancing for Esquire
magazine. His first story for the magazine, on the custom
car culture of Southern California, was stymied by writer’s
block. But Wolfe, at an editor’s behest, typed up his rough
notes, which the editor decided to publish, largely unedited.
The article’s exclamatory, overly punctuated, onomatopoetic style soon became Wolfe’s trademark as a journalist
and helped spawn the “New Journalism.” Later, Wolfe
often cited the Serapion Brothers, a group of experimental
writers in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as an additional
influence on his writing.
Wolfe’s articles from the early 1960s were collected in
the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby in
1965. He published several other collections: The Pump
House Gang (1968); Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter &
Vine (1976) and The Purple Decades (1982). His first booklength work of journalism was The Electric Kool-Acid
Test (1968), a innovative account of novelist Ken Kesey,
his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, and their role
in the early days of the psychedelic movement. Later, in
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970),
Wolfe displayed his conservative leanings by skewering a
fundraiser for the Black Panthers hosted by Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe also co-edited, with E.W. Johnson, an anthology of magazine articles and book excerpts by numerous
journalists called The New Journalism (1973). Besides
journalism, Wolfe published two books of criticism: The
Painted Word (1975), a critique of modern art, and From
Bauhaus to Our House (1981), an attack on modern architecture. He also published his illustrations, which often ran
in Harper’s magazine, in a book called In Our Time (1980).
Throughout much of the 1970s, Wolfe worked on a book
about the astronauts, The Right Stuff (1979), which became
a popular motion picture. During the early and mid-1980s,
as the interest in the New Journalism faded, Wolfe began a
serialized novel in Rolling Stone magazine, and a substantially revised version of that work became The Bonfi re of
the Vanities (1987), a Trollope-like saga of the downfall of
a wealthy philandering bond salesman, Sherman McCoy;
it also became a motion picture. Wolfe’s bestselling fiction did not impress more serious literary minds, however.
Novelists John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer,
described Wolfe’s fiction as more entertainment than literature. Wolfe responded by calling the three novelists “the
Three Stooges.’’ Wolfe further damaged his reputation with the literary establishment when, in 1989, he published
an essay in Harper’s called “Stalking the Billion-footed
Beast.” In the article, he argued that American novelists
were mired in their own minds and needed to return to
the social realism and naturalism of writers such as Emile
Zola, as Wolfe himself had done in The Bonfi re of the Vanities and would do again in his second novel, A Man in Full
(1998), which concerned the growth of Atlanta, Georgia,
and the modern South. Later, Wolfe published a collection of essays and short fiction, Hooking Up (2000), which
included the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg, previously serialized in Rolling Stone, and Tiny Mummies, a famous 1965
article in New York magazine that mocked The New Yorker
magazine. The article, when it was originally published,
ignited fierce debates among journalists about the accuracy
and ethics of Wolfe and the New Journalism, which critics
at the time derided as “parajournalism.”
Like several of the New Journalists, Wolfe became a
celebrity often profiled in the media; he cultivated the role
by making frequent speeches and public appearances, as
well as by wearing only tailor-made white suits, often with
a matching homburg. He also coined or made popular such
phrases as “good ol’ boy,” the right stuff,” “pushing the
envelope,” “the Me Decade” and “masters of the universe.”
Wolfe’s novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) concerned
college life at the end of the twentieth century. By mid-
2006, Wolfe, in his mid-seventies, said in interviews that
he was researching a novel on immigration in the United
States.
Further Reading
Bloom, Harold. Tom Wolfe. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.
McKeen, William, Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne’s, 1995.
Ragen, Brian Abel. Tom Wolfe, A Critical Companion. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Shomette, Doug. The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Weingarten, Mark. The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight. New
York, Crown, 2005.
Nick Ravo