TOM WOLFE

'Thomas Kennerly Wolfe' (born March 2, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia), known as 'Tom Wolfe', is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Contents

Biography

Education

Journalism and New Journalism

Non-fiction books

Novels

Trivia

Quotes

Bibliography

Fiction

Non-fiction

References

See also

External links

Biography

Education

Wolfe graduated from St. Christopher's School in Richmond before attending Washington and Lee University as an undergraduate, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He went on to graduate from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled ''The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942.''^[1]

Journalism and New Journalism

Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and eventually worked for the ''Washington Post'' and the ''New York Herald Tribune'' among others. While there he experimented with using fictional techniques in feature stories^[2].
During a New York newspaper strike, he approached ''Esquire Magazine'' about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of Southern California. He struggled with writing the article and editor Byron Dobell suggested that Wolfe send his notes to him so they could work together on the article. Wolfe sat down and wrote Dobell a letter saying everything he wanted to say about the subject, ignoring all conventions of journalism. Dobell simply removed the salutation "Dear Byron" from the top of the letter and published the notes as the article. The result was ''The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby''.
This was what Wolfe called New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. One of the most striking examples of this idea is Wolfe's ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test''. The book, while being a narrative account of the adventures of the Merry Pranksters, is also highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia, free association, and eccentric use of punctuation — such as multiple exclamation marks and italics — to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers.
As well as his own forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe also edited a collection of New Journalism with EW Johnson, published in 1973 and titled simply ''The New Journalism''. This book brought together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson, Norman Mailer and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and could be considered literature.

Non-fiction books

In 1965 a collection of his articles in this style was published under the title ''The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby'' and Wolfe's fame grew. A second volume of articles, entitled ''The Pump House Gang'', followed in 1968. He wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s was transformed as a result of post-WWII economic prosperity. His defining work from this era is ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (published the same day as "The Pump House Gang"), which epitomized the decade of the 1960s for many. Although a conservative in many ways and certainly not a hippie, Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.
In 1970 he published two essays in book form with ''Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers'': "These Radical Chic Evenings," a biting account of a party given by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party, and "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers," about the practice of using racial intimidation ("mau-mauing") to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers"). The phrase "radical chic" soon became a popular derogatory term for upper class leftism. In 1977, ''Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine'' hit bookstores; embodying one of Wolfe's more famous essays, ''The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening''.
In 1979 Wolfe published ''The Right Stuff'', an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts. Famously following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he likened these heroes to "single combat champions" of a by-gone era, going forth to battle in the Space Race on behalf of their country. In 1983 the book was adapted as a successful feature film.
Wolfe also wrote two highly critical social histories of modern art and modern architecture, ''The Painted Word'' and ''From Bauhaus To Our House'', in 1975 and 1981, respectively. "The Painted Word" mocked the excessive insularity of the art world and its dependence on faddish critical theory, while "From Bauhaus to Our House" explored the negative effects of the Bauhaus style on the evolution of modern architecture.
In 1984, Wolfe won the prestigious Dos Passos Prize for literature from Longwood University.

Novels

Several other books followed before Wolfe's first novel, the drama ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'', which was published in 1987 after having previously been serialized in ''Rolling Stone'' magazine. This book chronicles the spectacular fall of a successful New York bond trader named Sherman McCoy against a backdrop of 1980s New York. Critics praised the book in particular for its vivid evocation of New York's social, racial, and economic tensions. It was a runaway popular success, becoming one of the bestselling and most widely talked about books of the 1980s. Wolfe received $5 million for the film rights to ''Bonfire of the Vanities'', the most ever earned by an author at that time.
He followed this with a controversial 1989 essay in ''Harper's Magazine'' entitled ''Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast'', which criticized modern American novelists for failing to fully engage with their subjects, and suggested modern literature could be saved by a greater reliance on journalistic technique. This essay was seen as an attack on the mainstream literary establishment, and a boast that Wolfe's work was superior to more highly regarded authors^[3].
Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread interest in his second work of fiction. This project took him more than eleven years to complete; ''A Man in Full'' was published finally in 1998. The book's reception was not universally positive, despite glowing reviews published in ''Time'', ''Newsweek'', ''The Wall Street Journal'', and elsewhere. An enormous initial printing of 1.2 million copies was announced and the book stayed at number one on the ''New York Times'' bestseller list for ten weeks. John Updike wrote a critical review for ''The New Yorker'', in which he wrote that the novel "amounts to Entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." This touched off an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media between Wolfe and Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. Wolfe would later publish an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges."
After publishing ''Hooking Up'' (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella ''Ambush at Fort Bragg'') in 2001, he followed up with his third novel, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' (2004), which chronicles the culture clash between a poor scholarship student from Appalachia and the class prejudice, materialism and sexual promiscuity she finds at a prestigious contemporary American university. The novel met with a mostly tepid response by critics. The book also won praise from many political conservatives who saw the book's disturbing account of college sexuality as revealing moral decline. The novel won a dubious award from the London-based ''Literary Review'' "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel," though the author later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical.
Wolfe has written that his goal in writing fiction is to document contemporary society, in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens and Zola.

Trivia

★ Wolfe is known for his trademark white suit, which he wears on the cover of the paperback edition of ''Hooking Up''. In the episode Insane Clown Poppy of ''The Simpsons'' where he appeared as a guest star, his white suit is splattered with chocolate; immediately Wolfe rips the suit off as if it were tissue paper, revealing another pristine white suit underneath.


★ Wolfe guest starred alongside Jonathan Franzen, Gore Vidal and Michael Chabon in the Simpsons episode Moe'N'a Lisa, which aired November 19, 2006. He was originally slated to be killed by a giant boulder, but that ending was edited out. [1]

★ He is a fan of George W. Bush and is proud to say he voted for him. (Apparently Bush reciprocates the admiration. [2]) Indeed, when this emerged in an interview, Wolfe reveled in the reaction of the literary world. He said their reaction was as if he had said "I forgot to tell you - I'm a child molester". Because of this incident he now wears an American Flag pin on his suit, which he compared to "holding up a cross to werewolves". [3]

★ Wolfe is quoted in The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2007, as having written:
"Blogs are an advance guard to the rear. For example, only a primitive would believe a word of Wikipedia (which, though not strictly a blog, shares the characteristics of the genre). The entry under my name says that in 2003 "major news media" broadcast reports of my death and that
I telephoned Larry King and said, 'I ain't dead yet, give me a little more time and no doubt it will become true.'
"Oddly, this news supposedly broadcast never reached my ears in any form whatsoever prior to the Wikipedia entry, and I wouldn't have a clue as to how to telephone Larry King. I wouldn't have called him, in any case. I would have called my internist. I don't so much mind Wikipedia's recording of news that nobody ever disseminated in the first place as I do the lame comment attributed to me. I wouldn't say 'I ain't' even if I were singing a country music song. In fact, I have posted a $5,000 reward for anyone who can write a song containing the verb forms 'am not,' 'doesn't,' or 'isn't' that makes the Billboard Top Twenty."

★ On May 10, 2006, Tom Wolfe delivered the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (entitled "The Human Beast") at the Warner Theatre [4].

★ Wolfe is mentioned in the 2005 animated film Madagascar where Mason the monkey says "I hear Tom Wolfe's speaking at Lincoln Center." (the other monkey, Phil, signs frantically) and Mason responds, "Well, of course we're going to throw poo at him!"

★ Wolfe is featured in an episode of Speed tv's "Unique Whips" where his Cadillac's interior is customized to match his trademark white suit.

Quotes

★ "Every person on this earth has a great story to tell."

★ "There's probably not much else in the world that you can do that's more important than writing."

★ "I became involved in what eventually was known as "the New Journalism" as soon as I got to New York. I still had in my mind I was going to write novels. For the way I wanted to write a novel, I had to go out and do reporting just like the reporting that I did for "The Right Stuff", for the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", or anything else that I had written."

★ "A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."

★ "You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested."

★ "The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

★ "He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."

★
★ from "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America" in ''Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine'' (1976)

★ "A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power."

★
★ from "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening" in ''Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine'' (1976)

Bibliography

Fiction

★ ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' (2004)

★ '' Ambush at Fort Bragg'' (2000)

★ ''A Man in Full'' (1998)

★ ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' (1987)

Non-fiction

★ ''Hooking Up'' (2000)

★ ''The Purple Decades'' (1982)

★ ''From Bauhaus to Our House'' (1981)

★ ''In Our Time'' (1980)

★ ''The Right Stuff'' (1979)

★ ''Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine'' (1976)

★ ''The Painted Word'' (1975)

★ ''The New Journalism'' (1975) (co-edited with EW Johnson)

★ ''Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers'' (1970)

★ ''The Pump House Gang'' (1968)

★ ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (1968)

★ ''The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby'' (1965)

References

1. Available on microform from the Yale University Libraries, Link to Entry
2. Tom Wolfe's Washington Post
3. http://www.lukeford.net/Images/photos3/tomwolfe.pdf

See also

★ Hysterical realism

★ Wolfe's concept of fiction-absolute.

External links

★ Official website

★ Tom Wolfe author page by Guardian Unlimited

★ National Review 100 Best Non Fiction Books 20th Century

★ Tom Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture

★ Tom Wolfe's Cadillac]