Everything about Tom Wolfe totally explained
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe (born
March 2,
1931 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.
Biography
Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia to Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr. and Helen Hughes Wolfe. His father had a Ph.D. from
Cornell University and was a professor of
agronomy at
Virginia Tech. He also owned two farms and was the director of a successful farmer's cooperative. Wolfe Sr.'s success as a businessman afforded the family a genteel lifestyle. Wolfe Sr. also found time to pursue work as an author and journalist. He edited a farming journal,
The Southern Planter, and published books on similar topics. It was Wolfe's mother, however, who introduced him to arts. She enrolled her son in tap dancing and ballet, taught him to sketch and read to him regularly. By the age of 9, Wolfe had started writing. Not yet a teenager, Wolfe attempted to write a biography of
Napoleon, and wrote and illustrated a life of
Mozart. Wolfe has a sister who is five years younger.
Education
Wolfe was an outstanding student, as well as student council president, editor of the school newspaper and a star
Lacrosse player at St. Christopher's School, an all-boys school in Richmond, Virginia.
Upon graduation in 1947 he turned down admission at
Princeton University to attend
Washington and Lee University, then an all-male school. Wolfe majored in English, but practiced his writing outside the classroom as well. He was the sports editor of the college newspaper and helped found a literary magazine,
Shenandoah. Of particular influence was his professor
Marshall Fishwick, an American Studies professor educated at Yale. More in the tradition of anthropologists than literary scholars, Fishwick taught his classes to look at the whole of a culture, even those elements considered profane. The very title of Wolfe's undergraduate thesis, "A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America," evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated
cum laude in 1951.
Wolfe had continued playing baseball as a pitcher and had begun to play semi-professionally while still in college. In 1952 he earned a tryout with the
New York Giants. His baseball career ended, however, when he was cut after three days, a failing Wolfe attributed to his inability to throw good fastballs. Wolfe abandoned baseball, and instead followed the example of his professor Marshall Fishwick, by enrolling in Yale University's American Studies doctoral program. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled
The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942. While the thesis was historical, it was on a literary subject and for the thesis Wolfe interviewed many of the writers chronicled in his thesis, including
Malcolm Cowley,
Archibald MacLeish and
James T. Farrell. Ragen said of Wolfe's thesis, "reading it, one sees what has been the most baleful influence of graduate education on many who have suffered through it: it deadens all sense of style."
Journalism and New Journalism
Though Wolfe was offered teaching jobs in academia, he instead opted to work as a reporter. In 1956 while still working on his thesis, Wolfe became a reporter for the
Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wolfe finished his thesis in 1957 and in 1959 was hired by
The Washington Post. Wolfe has said that part of the reason he was hired by the Post was his lack of interest in politics. The Post's city editor was, "amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill, the beat every reporter wanted." He won an award from the newspaper guild for foreign reporting in Cuba in 1961, and also won the guild's award for humor. While there he experimented with using fictional techniques in feature stories.
In 1962 Wolfe left Washington for
New York City, taking a position with the
New York Herald-Tribune as a general assignment reporter and a feature writer. The editors of the
Herald-Tribune encouraged their writers to break the conventions of newspaper writing. During a New York newspaper strike in 1963, Wolfe 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, published in 1964, was "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." The article was widely discussed—loved by some, hated by others—and helped Wolfe publish his first book,
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of his writings in the
Herald-Tribune,
Esquire and elsewhere.
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.
In addition to his own forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe 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,
Gay Talese,
Joan Didion 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 in
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.
Art critiques
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.
Novels
Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel that would capture the wide spectrum of American society. Among his models was
William Makepeace Thackeray's
Vanity Fair, which described the society of 19th century England. The book never materialized as Wolfe had occupied his time with his commitment to
Harper's and his various nonfiction books, until 1981, when he ceased his other projects to work on the novel.
Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of the Bronx homicide squad. While the research came easy, the writing didn't follow. To overcome his writers' block, Wolfe wrote to
Jann Wenner, editor of
Rolling Stone to propose an idea drawn from
Charles Dickens and Thackeray. The Victorian novelists that Wolfe viewed as his models had often written their novels in serial installments. Wenner offered Wolfe around $200,000 to serialize his work. The deadline pressure forced him to write—from July 1984 to August 1985 each biweekly issue of
Rolling Stone contained a new installment. Wolfe wasn't happy with his "very public first draft", and thoroughly revised his work. Even Sherman McCoy, the central character of the novel, changed—originally a writer, the book version cast McCoy as a bond trader. Wolfe researched and revised for two years.
The Bonfire of the Vanities appeared in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on bestseller lists and earning praise from much of the literary establishment on which Wolfe had long heaped scorn.
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 wasn't 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. In 2001, Wolfe published 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 won praise, however, 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
John Steinbeck,
Charles Dickens and
Emile Zola.
In early 2008 it was announced that Wolfe left his long time publisher Farrar, Strauss. His fourth novel,
Back to Blood is set to be published in 2009 by
Little, Brown. According to
The New York Times Wolfe will be paid close to US$7 million for the book. According to the publisher,
Back to Blood will be about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first."
The white suit
Wolfe adopted the white suit as a trademark in 1962. He bought his first white suit planning to wear it in the summer in the style of Southern gentleman. The suit he purchased, however, was too heavy in the summer for his tastes and so he wore it in winter instead. He found wearing the suit in the winter created a sensation and adopted it as his trademark. Wolfe has maintained the uniform ever since, sometimes worn with a matching white tie, white
homburg hat, and two-tone shoes. Wolfe has said that the outfit disarms the people he observes, making him, in their eyes, "a man from Mars, the man who didn't know anything and was eager to know."
Views
In 1989 Wolfe wrote a controversial 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.
Wolfe is a fan of
George W. Bush and voted for him for President in 2004, due to what he calls Bush's "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." (Bush, in turn, reciprocates the admiration, having read all of Wolfe's books.) After this fact emerged in a
New York Times interview, Wolfe said that the reaction in the literary world was as if he'd said "I forgot to tell you - I'm a child molester." Because of this incident he sometimes wears an
American flag pin on his suit, which he compared to "holding up a cross to werewolves
[sic]."
Wolfe's views and choice of subject material, such as mocking
left-wing intellectuals in
Radical Chic and glorifying astronauts in
The Right Stuff, have sometimes led to him being labelled
conservative or
reactionary, labels that he rejects. He has said that his "idol" in writing about society and culture is Emile Zola, who, in Wolfe's words, was "a man of the left" but "went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply couldn't - and wasn't interested in - telling a lie."
Asked to comment by the
Wall Street Journal on
blogs in 2007, to mark the tenth anniversary of their advent, Wolfe wrote that "the universe of blogs is a universe of rumors," and that "blogs are an advance guard to the rear." He also criticized
Wikipedia, which he said "only a primitive would believe a word of," noting a story about him that was in his Wikipedia entry at the time, which he said never happened.
Impact
Wolfe is credited with introducing the terms "statusphere," "the right stuff," "radical chic," "the Me Decade," and "good ol' boy" into the English lexicon. He is sometimes credited with inventing the term "
trophy wife" as well, but this is incorrect.
Awards and accolades
Wolfe's 1979 book
The Right Stuff won the
American Book Award for nonfiction, the
National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the
Columbia Journalism Award.
In 1984, Wolfe won the prestigious
Dos Passos Prize for literature from
Longwood University.
Wolfe's 2006 novel
I Am Charlotte Simmons "won" the Literary Review's
Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
On May 10, 2006, Tom Wolfe delivered the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (entitled "The Human Beast") at the Warner Theatre
(External Link
).
Bibliography
Non-fiction
Fiction
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
Ambush at Fort Bragg (1997)
A Man in Full (1998)
I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004)
Back to Blood (2009)
Collections
Hooking Up (2000)
Selected articles
"Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" New York Herald-Tribune supplement (April 11, 1965).
"Lost in the Whichy Thicket," New York Herald-Tribune supplement (April 18, 1965).
"The Birth of the New Journalism: Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe." New York Magazine, February 14, 1972.
"The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets." New York Magazine, February 21, 1972.
"Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore." Esquire, December 1972.
"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," Harper's. November 1989.
"Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died." Forbes 1996.
Cultural references
Wolfe is depicted in the Simpsons episode Insane Clown Poppy, though the real-life author doesn't actually make a guest appearance, as he's no speaking lines. In the brief clip, Wolfe's trademark white suit is splattered with chocolate; immediately he rips it 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. (External Link)
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 was featured on the February 2006 episode, "The White Stuff," of SPEED Channel's Unique Whips, where his Cadillac's interior was customized to match his trademark white suit.
In the episode "Lorelai's Graduation Day" of Gilmore Girls, Rory meets Jess in New York who is reading Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". This book is also referenced in the episode "Take The Deviled Eggs..." when Town Selectman Taylor says that Babette can "hang out in Haight-Ashbury and drink as much electric kool-aid" as she wants.
In the August, 1971 issue of The Incredible Hulk ("They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?") Wolfe attends an Upper East Side, high-society benefit for the Hulk; a direct parody of the Leonard Bernstein Black Panthers fundraiser in Radical Chic.
Footnotes
Further Information
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