The NYT obituary, "Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic Nonfiction Writer and Novelist, Dies at 87":
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattans moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 87....I don't think there has been a more important writer in our lifetime. So brilliant. So many ideas about new ways to write. I'm going to click on my Tom Wolfe tag to see what I've said about him. I feel really sad to lose him. I knew he was pretty old and would have to go sometime, but it surprised me to see the news just now. Such a loss!
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism....
From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the sixties hipster subculture,” the press critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.
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211 comments:
1 – 200 of 211 Newer› Newest»I just saw the headline too and though who is Tom Wolfe. I'm not curious enough to google it.
Bummer.
There was a demon in the air.
rhhardin-
You are not manly enough to know who Tom Wolfe is.
I must have missed it. I was doing math at the time.
I couldn't agree more as to there not being a more important writer in our lifetime. He was unquestionably the most astute observer and brilliant annalist of modern American culture and society.
I know who Terry Southern is or was.
Barthelme was great, Snow White for instance.
I had seen it myself a few minutes ago and came here to see if Ms. Althouse had already blogged it.
I had read The Right Stuff in high school at some point, so I knew who he was when Bonfire of the Vanities was published in the late 80s and I read within months of its publication- I liked it very much at the time, and reread it about 20 years later and liked it even better. I later that year read A Man in Full, but that was the last novel of his I read. At around that same time (2008 or so), I read some more of the non-fiction he had written, but I didn't like it nearly as much as The Right Stuff.
I'll take 87 but he was a great talent.
"Bonfire of the Vanities" was so accurate and so vicious a take on the characters that I could only read it for a while then had to go to something else. I would go back the next day.
Just as true today. It was a delicious irony that the movie was so fucked up.
Peter deVries, Vale of Laughter.
I heartily recommend "Radical Chic" for a hilarious look into the zeitgeist of the era.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22. Read once when it came out and I remember every word.
Tom Wolfe escaped my notice, probably for some reason or other.
Wolfe’s writing was very humorous. I guess you could say it was scathing at times, though that word is pretty dead from overuse. I really enjoy Radical Chic. His novels have some good stuff but are uneven.
Thomas Berger, Who Is Teddy Villanova
A very great one has passed away.
Will not get the Nobel he deserved, now, but in that he is in good company.
I've read Bonfires several times, each time getting something new. That novel continues to play out again and again. Watching lefty Sherman McCoy get his, pure joy. It should happen to all smug lefties. If today Reverend Bacon also passed on, not a tear would be shed. But for TW to go, real sadness.
I associate Tom Wolfe with Bella Abzug, but don't know where the impression came from.
The great thing about great artists is they live long past when they die.
Tom Wolfe will live a very long while through his prose.
That's better than most of us do.
He was a fun read. He represents the best product of the vanishing Southern liberal arts education given to a free thinker.
Maybe he'll get to meet the Master of the Universe.
The.Absolute.Best.
I seriously think "Bonfire of the Vanities" (the book, not movie) changed my life. Can't believe the book is 30 years old.
And, then going back to read, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catcher" and all his great stuff from the 60s' and 70s was a real treat.
And, finally, the absolutely phenomenal. space-race masterpiece, "The Right Stuff". Oh boy.
We have lost a legend. But, he had a wonderful, long, meaningful life.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Wolfe
A cultural event I actually care about! I’ve read Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff. Sounds like I should read Bonfires.
Run, don't walk, to re-read "Radical Chic" in honor of his memory. Every page is laugh-out-loud funny.
One of the very few clear eyed writers of our time.
"A Man in Full" was every bit the novel that "Bonfires" was. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the love.
My only pique on him was that he seemed unable to conclude a novel with the flair that you'd expect from the first 400 pages.
"Oh no!"
That's what I said, too. Oh, no.
Sadly too, it's hard to see any legacy writers he's nurtured and left to carry on.
A Man in Full was about Real Estate Developers in Atlanta. Wolf nailed it.
The best sentence from the Wiki bio:
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."
If only we had a few reporters that felt the same way,. I think Woodward and Bernstein ruined reporting.
The worst thing about this ( well, age got him before death did) is there is so much Wolfean material about, much more than in his time, and no Wolfe to use it.
there is so much Wolfean material about, much more than in his time, and no Wolfe to use it.
Imagine what fun he would have with Mueller.
All his novels are great. I liked Back to Blood the best. Jay Vogt, I thought it had a great ending.
Wolfe really captured the voice of his subjects in his non-fiction: The Right Stuff sounded like my dad and his buddies, US Air Force fighter pilots, were telling the story. Similarly, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sounded like it was being told by a deadhead, LSD aficionado.
His novels, on the other hand, read like reporting. Especially The Bonfire of the Vanities, but to some lesser extent, A Man In Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons.
"Bonfire" was about scandalous New York. The publicity value was built-in.
"Bonfire" also came out before the polarization of later days. You could sell "Bonfire" to liberals.
And "A Man in Full" is much more of an overtly philosophical piece. Less fireworks. Meant seriously, to ask about why and how to live.
“I associate Tom Wolfe with Bella Abzug, but don't know where the impression came from.”
The hats.
Agree with Ann. Tom Wolfe was one of the most important writers of our times.
A great loss.
Interesting that so many here in the Althouse community loved Tom Wolfe's books.
Ann, of course, writes in a style like Tom Wolfe so not all that surprising.
Like-minded people end up finding each other.
Nothing will ever beat “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher.”
God bless him. Painted Word, Radical Chic, Right Stuff, Acid Test and Bonfire (esp the Sharpton character). Master unraveler; deadly skewerer. Far more prolific than Heller, and funnier, were it not for Catch-22.
He was our Balzac. Now we need another one.
Wolfe's last book, "The Kingdom of Speech" is short, but really good, too. He dips his toes into science and evolution (if you can believe it). He absolutely nails Noam Chomsky and all these professional academic linguists who make up a buncha scientific-sounding bullshit to feebly attempt to mask their lack of understanding of language and how or whether it evolves.
Wolfe was not exactly pro-counterculture.
All his stuff has, somewhere, his matador's estoque of, usually, bittersweet irony.
Often well hidden, for a while, behind the narrative muleta.
How the heck does the NYT screw up the title of one of TW's later books, "I am Charlotte Simmons"?
When he wrote about something, it changed the way you thought about it forever. His take on the events, fads, art that he encountered will prove to more durable than the events, fads and art that he described. The counter culture has come and gone, but The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test remains and The Bonfire of the Vanities continues to illuminate our fool's errand.
From what I have seen of Balzac - and there is a huge lot of untranslated Balzac, and I can't read French on that level - Wolfe was better. Deeper, richer and and more subtle, or funnier when he wasn't.
Dickens is the closest.
I heard Wolfe on TV (probably C-Span) talk about "I am Charlotte Simmons" and how he discovered colleges now had co-ed bathrooms in the dorms. At one college, the showers were all out in the open with just the shower heads on the wall; no walls or curtains. So how did the girls take showers? According to Tom they would blast the hot water and "build up a little wall of steam." That didn't make the book but the whole book is very funny.
I then wrote a letter to then Representative Tom Osborne. Osborne had retired as football coach at Nebraska. I asked him to introduce the "Charlotte Simmons" bill and require universities to have separate bathrooms in the dorms.
I got back a nice letter. Nothing happened. I wonder if Dr. Tom got the joke. And look where we are today with bathrooms. Wolfe had a great ability to predict the future.
I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel by Thomas Wolfe NOT I Am Charlotte Curtis as mentioned in the New York Times obituary. Charlotte Curtis was a journalist like Thomas Wolfe was.
https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Charlotte-Simmons-Novel/dp/0312424442/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526401852&sr=8-1&keywords=I+am+charlotte+simmons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Curtis
Damn. That's a shame. When I was in high school I found an anthology of New Journalism. I was entranced. I read a lot of Tom Wolfe. Tom Wolfe rewired my head.
How the heck does the NYT screw up the title of one of TW's later books, "I am Charlotte Simmons"?
They don't care about getting things right.
"Bonfire ..." is up there with "Atlas Shrugged" when it comes to truly inspired novels - timeless.
We should all dress in white to look as young as he did.
May I suggest "Radical Chic" as relevant today?
I remember seeing The Right Stuff in a theater in DC with my father. He didn't go to the movies with us often (usually Mom's job) but he went to see this with me. I was really wowed by the film up there on that big screen (probably the biggest screen I had seen at that point). Of all the movies I watched in my childhood, this one was really a memorable milestone.
Side note: it was the only movie I ever went to that featured an intermission! I don't think it was shown everywhere that way, but this theater did have one. I wish I could remember where we saw it.
He was a great writer, but his kind of racism (AKA recognition of reality) would never be tolerated today.
And that Richmond accent was just . . . . . disarming
When I lived in Minneapolis in the '80s, there was a guy there ( I think he was a part of the advertising community ) who made a showy point of wearing white or cream colored tailored suits in the summer and similarly cut black ones the rest of the year. He had a hat and maybe a cane. He showed up at all the "scenes". A very lame rip-off of Wolfe. Even back then in Minneapolis it was pretentious.
One day in the 80's I took my 12 year old daughter and several of her friends to an amusement park. I spent the day sitting on a bench reading Bonfire. At least twice, strangers asked me what I was reading that was laugh out loud funny. And who can forget his appearance on the Simpson's.
I read "Bonfire" when it first came out and stayed up until 2 am on a weeknight because I could not put it down. "A Man In Full," "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," "Radical Chic" (the greatest satire of NY limousine liberals ever written), "The Right Stuff" - he wrote so many great novels and essays. And no contemporary writer was more American. Like John Dos Passos, he wrote big sprawling, hugely ambitious novels that sought to capture both the absurdity and greatness of America between their covers. And, IMO, he did it with more humor and style than Dos Passos.
He lived a long and full life, but I am still sad there will be no more new Tom Wolfe novels.
"At least twice, strangers asked me what I was reading that was laugh out loud funny."
The scene where Sherman is released on bail and regales jaded dinner party attendees with stories of his jailhouse experiences is hilarious and brilliant.
Wasn't the drunken Brit journalist based on Christopher Hitchens?
Who here knows that Bonfire was originally published in Rolling Stone in 2 week installments (Natch) and that Sherman was a bond broker?
Crumbs!
i personally prefer hunter thompson to tom wolfe. i have yet to find another writer that comes close to either their mastery of english language prose
"Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic Nonfiction Writer and Novelist, Dies at 87":
Damn!! You know by the time I had clicked through that link......he was dead again at 88!!
Mark Twain pulled this stunt as well.
I had exactly the same reaction, "Oh, no!@"
Put me down as someone else who does not know who Tom Wolfe is/was.
I'd put "Bonfire" in my pantheon of epic novels along with:
1. "Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
2. "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
It irks me to no end that I can't get my kids to read these 3 books, but I've told Bay Area Gal, that when I go, I want these books in my casket -- in the rare event that in the afterlife they let you read.
He will be missed. One of the greats but certainly not the greatest. Keenest eye on our evaporating culture and a broad range of the culture's components from Wall Street to the campus, from the racial tensions to the counterculture and modern "art." There are better novelists and better non fiction writers but no better at both. RIP.
Yes, sometimes the shock of loss is more a function of the importance of a figure to who we are, than his or her age. Tom Wolfe will be the go to writer 200 years from now for anyone trying to understand how late 20th Century Americans were. Curiously, I found him to most resemble Mark Twain in his fiction writing; once his portraits were finished, he tended to lose interest, and his best works (as Huckleberry Finn) just sort of petered out. Like life, I suppose.
I mailed a girl I met in Australia a copy of Huckleberry Finn which I adore for its anti-bigotry statement. She wrote back and asked why the author was such a racist.
We didn’t really get past that point.
I want these books in my casket -- in the rare event that in the afterlife they let you read.
Along with the check left by your lawyer buddy.
It reminds me of the story of the three college buddies who made a pact that, if they were successful in life, they would each put a thousand dollars in the casket of the ones who died before. When the first one died, the two buddies left went to the funeral. One put a thousand dollar bill in the casket and then turned to see the other one, who was now a lawyer, take the bill out and leave a check for two thousand.
i have yet to find another writer that comes close to either their mastery of english language prose
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
I’ll admit the only reason I first read Tom Wolf in 1965 was the Kustom Kolor in the title and the psychedelic script on the cover. Hey, I was just a book-aholic, car-obsessed high school kid. It completely rewrote the menu in my head of what types of books from which to select.
Without Wolfe I may never have investigated Ken Keasey, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson or Jerzy Kosinsky. I might have stayed content with traditional lightweight pop fiction, stuck with the math major, made a lot of money and never discoverd the joys of Eng Lit which left me poor and happy. Thanks, Tom— R.I.P.
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
added to my reading list, thanks for the tip.
SDaly said...
"The Painted Word is still the best book on post-War art."
And From Bauhaus To Our House is equally good on architecture.
I will slightly revise my post of 12:18 to note that Joan Didion, in my view, is his equal in fiction and non fiction.
jerzy kosinsky! jeez, i had (almost) completely forgotten about jerzy kosinsky. damn me and my forgetfulness :(
kosinsky doesn't have the gift for english prose that wolfe and especially thompson do (how could he, he's polish i think?) but nobody else writes like kosinsky does.
another author i have long admired was richard brautigan.
"Wasn't the drunken Brit journalist based on Christopher Hitchens?"
Possibly, but Hitch claims Fallow was based on Anthony Haden-Guest. It may have struck too close to home for Hitchens. Either man would have provided a lot of material for Wolfe, so maybe it was both.
Started with the right stuff, the film doesnt do it justice, we'll leave out what depalma did to bonfire, man in full was disappointing the college one was prophetic and the Miami one was disturbing on point.
It's only a matter of time before there are demands to remove Wolfe's book from library shelves and required-reading lists.
Cockburn most likely, although guest is a,reasonable assumption.
His nonfiction, maumaing in Oakland sneaking into the panther lovefest at Leonard bernstein, capturing the arch cynicism of reveL and grasse.
"Radical Chic" (the greatest satire of NY limousine liberals ever written)
I came to know of Tom Wolfe in weird way. It was in The Incredible Hulk # 142 that the Internet tells me was published in 1971.
The setup is a fundraising party in a chic New York penthouse where the lastest passion of the moment is no longer The Black Panthers, but the newest of the oppressed, the GREEN skin Hulk.
On the splash page showing the party in full swing, artist Herb Trimpe has Wolfe watching over with notepad in hand (with big, yellow arrow pointing to him and giving his name) , reporting on this latest "Radical Chic" party. It was my first introduction to the vapidity of the limousine liberal. I real eye-opener, you might say. It stuck to me like glue and since they credited the story idea to Wolfe, I found a new author who then proceed to floored me.
A few years later, The Right Stuff was coming out and Wolfe was doing a book signing at the Rich's Department store at Lenox Square. It was the only book signing I ever went to and when it came my time to get it signed, I told him the story of how "The Hulk" brought me here. He gave a flourishing, personalized greeting to me saying something like, Tell the Hulk thanks from me...Tom Wolfe.
I had to give you the 'I think' for what he wrote because, fool that I am, I "loaned" that signed, first edition to someone. I hope they enjoy it, even though I am sure the signature puzzles them.
He made Chuck Yeager a multi-millionaire. No one cared about the sound barrier until Wolfe made it seem manly.
As Yeager himself said, it was only pure luck he survived and didn't get a street at Edwards Air Force Base named after him.
LATImes art writer Christopher Knight tweeted that TW's Painted Word was jejune. Sour much, CK?
I suppose he was a good writer, meaning he would not saddle the reader with phrases like the Times obit. Technicolor prose indeed. Was he writing in crayon?
I loved Wolfe's novels.
One note: I was recently out of college when Charlotte Simmons was published and, while he was close, he got many things juuuuuust a bit wrong.
Based off that, I wondered if the information/accuracy that I so prized when reading Bonfire or a Man in Full felt just as strained to someone who knew that world inside and out.
I recently re-read "The Right Stuff" and re-watched the movie.
The book was spectacular (again), and I even gleaned some new nuance, such as how the Soviet launch of "Sputnik" - a little 200 pound globe -- absolutely freaked out the US Defense Department, and how much the space race was embedded into the Cold War.
The movie held up well, too, certainly better than any of the modern day crap, but the best parts were Chuck Yeager and the fighter jockeys at Edwards, not the astronauts.
Well the latter was a dissapointment, Charlotte Simmons did capture the milieu. When there was also this,kerfluffle over scaramamuccis blue streak I recognized it from bonfire.
>>I heartily recommend "Radical Chic" for a hilarious look into the zeitgeist of the era.
Abso freakin lutely.
I remember reading it with disbelief in my younger days... Black Panthers going to Leonard Bernstein's apartment *for a party* ??????
And the guest asking one of the Panthers who she should call to invite one of them to a party...
Amazing stuff.
while he was close, he got many things juuuuuust a bit wrong.
Well it is a novel, after all, not a documentary. On his non-fiction, @Iowahawkblog has this to say:
There is the "Gell-Mann Effect," when you cringe at how awfully wrong a journalist can be when they write about your sphere of expertise. Not so with Tom Wolfe. He got the details right about hot rod culture, even tho he was an outsider Ivy League dandy.
"Test pilots" probably better than "fighter jockeys" above. Not talking about Top Gun...
They shouldn't have, had they relied on the,army's Redstone rather than the navy's vanguard they might have near the russian.
Yes the filn is fairly faithful but it couldn't capture the atmosphere inn the same way.
Ann, I had the same reaction as you. I knew he was old, but I did not expect to 'lose' him. Somehow Tom Wolfe has always been there in the background of my times. Somewhere in an old box in a storage unit, I have a paperback version of 'Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers'. I do believe it was an assigned book for one of my English courses in college in the early 70s. That was my intro to him. From there I jumped back to his previous books, then forward with him as the new ones would appear over the course of our times. I cannot imagine his books even being allowed to be read in today's universities- such is the totalitarian pit they've become.
No one like him previously. No one will be like him again. His insight, his ability to be both journalist and story teller, his nailing our societal quirks as the decades changed, and of course, his sartorial finesse were singular. His voice is going to be missed.
Sadly so, so much of the prose of that era is self indulgent twaddle Norman mailer to the white coirtsey and what passes for modern literature, requires ipecac on both shores to endure.
Ya really, really wished that Abe Weiss, Reginald Bacon, and Peter Fallow would have all gotten theirs. That the lefty McCoy was hung out to dry was good, but it didn't give me the sense of justice that the story demanded. Likely that was what TW intended. I've gone through, in my mind, the list of principal and near-principal characters; there's any one of them that I actually liked.
McCoy was an arriviste his father was a southern white shoe lawyer, but st Paul and yale (who has that pedigree) made him acceptable in the trading pits
As for bacon and Weiss a little too close to the truth, the great white defendant indeed.
I wondered if the information/accuracy that I so prized when reading Bonfire or a Man in Full felt just as strained to someone who knew that world inside and out.
A few years after "Bonfire," I was to testify in a med-mal case in the Bronx Supreme Court, the setting of the court scenes in the novel. The lawyer, defending a client who had been shot by his probation officer, was almost a replica of the Richard Dreyfuss character in the movie "Nuts." His office was down the street from the courthouse. The air conditioner in the window of his office was surrounded by a steel grill to keep clients from stealing it.
The court house had no benches or other seating arrangements outside the court room. Since I was a witness, I asked a guard where I was to sit. He arranged for me to wait in the law library. When I asked about benches, he said if they were there they would be filled with sleeping "bums." That was before "homeless."
The trial was conducted before 7 jurors, not 12. Midway through the deliberations, the jury sent a note to the judge asking that one juror be required to bathe. He smelled so bad the other jurors could not stand to be in the same room.
The verdict was in favor of the defendant whose care had been botched by the city hospital. It was for $500,000 and the lawyer was ecstatic. He was normally a criminal defense lawyer and that fee was probably half his annual income.
Yes, it was just like the novel.
"there's any one of them that I actually liked."
One problem I had with the novel was that there was no likable character.
Yes there was a problem there, the big Apple hadn't fully degenerAted as it did in the Dinkins era.
"I’ll admit the only reason I first read Tom Wolf in 1965 was the Kustom Kolor in the title and the psychedelic script on the cover. Hey, I was just a book-aholic, car-obsessed high school kid"
yes, i read a lot of his books, but (to me) by far the best was the car book*
he wrote that like he was a car guy! Later, in his other books he sounds like his subject, but i'm most impressed with the cars... pretty easy to have screwed them up
the car book* The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby i had to look it up; i could Never remember that title :)
Bay Area Guy
Ever read The Sot-Weed Factor by Barth? Belongs with the other 3 on your list.
Blessed are You, Oh Lord our God, the Righteous Judge.
Wolfe was and will be sacred of sorts to me. He shaped my thinking, my research, and my ability to analyze groups and group think. With incredible prose. He was everything the Beats or Thompson never were.
The Radical Chic is available here: http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
He did not need to write the Sequel since Bernsteins and the Panthers can be easily reread changing the title and the key names to Clintons and the PLO.
His works are our benediction.
Amen
@Ken B,
"Ever read The Sot-Weed Factor by Barth? Belongs with the other 3 on your list."
No, but many thanks for the suggestion. Will check it out.
"One problem I had with the novel was that there was no likable character."
What about that judge?
One note: I was recently out of college when Charlotte Simmons was published and, while he was close, he got many things juuuuuust a bit wrong.
Based off that, I wondered if the information/accuracy that I so prized when reading Bonfire or a Man in Full felt just as strained to someone who knew that world inside and out.
5/15/18, 1:20 PM
"Charlotte Simmoms" is my least favorite Wolfe work. I've been out of college for a while, but I too found it sounded "off." Both Charlotte and Connie in "A Man in Full" are pretty improbable characters, but Wolfe made Connie believable. I didn't think Charlotte was.
But remember - he was in his 70's at the time it was written and he still took it upon himself to travel to colleges and talk to the kids there. At that age, perhaps he simply couldn't quite capture their voice and worldview. I don't think it discredits his earlier work. He was running out of steam.
It's a shame we will never get to read his last book. It is a mediation on the life of Kaitlyn Jenner where she talks about how she regrets her attempt at changing her gender.
The working title is "You Can't Go Homo Again."
First introduced to the term " indict a ham sandwich" from his "Bonfire of the Vanities.Great at explaining culture during his time.
In The Right Stuff, Wolfe likens media to "The Victorian Gentleman," whose primary concern after an event is to find and then broadcast the correct emotional response. Supporting data are emphasized while the opposing are ignored. -wsw
“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)”
"and, while he was close, he got many things juuuuuust a bit wrong."
Yes. He mentioned college fans of Britney Spears, which was a very false note.
"It's a shame we will never get to read his last book. It is a mediation on the life of Kaitlyn Jenner where she talks about how she regrets her attempt at changing her gender.
"The working title is 'You Can't Go Homo Again.'"
The wrong Tom Wolfe.
I know Captain Literal. It is thing. Called a joke. You might have heard of it comrade.
"LATImes art writer Christopher Knight tweeted that TW's Painted Word was jejune. Sour much, CK?"
I read it in the 80s and mildly enjoyed it, but it was the least compelling of the books of his I'd read. It was, in fact, jejune.(This is not to say it lacked any truth.)
I remember reading The Sot Weed Factor in a single sitting. Never read a novel that way before or since.
At the end of the 20th century, National Review formed a panel to list and rank the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was 37th, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was 91st. Panelist John O'Sullivan wrote: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."
A short 1988 Tom Wolfe essay even more germane today.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/06/head-class-tom-wolfe/
He had his head screwed on straight too, in other words he wasn't a liberal.
"It's a shame we will never get to read his last book. It is a mediation on the life of Kaitlyn Jenner where she talks about how she regrets her attempt at changing her gender.
The working title is 'You Can't Go Homo Again.'"
You show what a bigoted slob you really are. I hope God smites you for your nasty comment.
Bonfire was both a great story and technically brilliant. A Man In Full just didn't move me the same way.
"Wasn't the drunken Brit journalist based on Christopher Hitchens?"
Possibly, but Hitch claims Fallow was based on Anthony Haden-Guest. It may have struck too close to home for Hitchens. Either man would have provided a lot of material for Wolfe, so maybe it was both.
I always thought Henry Fairlie was the inspiration, or partial inspiration. Fairlie, who wrote for the New Republic, was another one of those alcoholic Brits know-it-alls who found a home in American letters. He and Hitchens were very much birds of a feather, although they would both have denied it.
Probably Fallow was a composite of the three.
Oh, yeah, Cockburn too. No shortage, in those days, of drunk know-it-all British writers colonizing the American literary scene.
Absolutely adored him. i am so sad. What a monumental talent. Reading Tom Wolfe was a privilege.
Vicki from Pasadena
Yes there was a problem there, the big Apple hadn't fully degenerAted as it did in the Dinkins era.
The Big Apple's absolute nadir extended from the 70s through the early 80s, maybe a bit later depending on the neighborhood -- if you were on West Side dealing Jimmie Coonan and Mickey Featherstone and their merry band of cutthroat, Westies, it would last right up to the end of the 80s.
Watch the 1977 documentary, "The Police Tapes," for a revealing portrayal of NYC in the 70s -- and for a vision of Hell at any time. Filmed in the South Bronze.
Hey Trumpit go suck a dick.
Wait a minute. I don't have to tell to do that. That's your vocation.
Enjoy yourself you degenerate.
I enjoyed reading y'all's memories and reactions to his writings, but I don't understand commenting that you have never heard of the person who is the subject of a post. It's OK not to know, but why make a point of parading your ignorance for the world to see?
The Bernstein/Black Panthers party scene is evergreen and is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 1970.
Bonfire was so realistically written that I still get it mixed up with the non-fiction Barbarians at the Gate written like a novel at about the same time and the same milieu.
It is also heartening to see that I am not the only person to think that Sot Weed Factor is his/her life changing and defining book. It's time to read the SWF again and to reread the Complete Works of Tom Wolfe. I didn't realize he was as old as he was, his voice remained young. I will certainly miss this literary companion of my life. Oh, dear.Good summer reading lined up. Thanks.
I saw him live once, when he was a guest on Buckley's "Firing Line" discussing this then-new book "The Painted Word." I was in the audience. It was interesting (I didn't have the interest in art that I do now), but the main thing I took away from it was a term Wolfe used, "a vacuum word," by which he meant a word that has lost all intrinsic meaning and can now mean whatever meaning the speaker or writer can give it. (Like "fascism" these days.) I found that a useful concept and have used it myself, giving credit wherever possible.
Sot Weed Factor was John Barth, of Giles Goat Boy, and The Floating Opera. I just was responding to a comment. If you liked Sot Weed Factor, you might like Enderby, by Anthony Burgess.
"Oh, yeah, Cockburn too. No shortage, in those days, of drunk know-it-all British writers colonizing the American literary scene."
Which Cockburn? There are several, all related. Alexander Cockburn, deceased, was the best of them.
Tom Wolfe was a very great writer. I read a some of his books, but so long ago that I really don't remember much. I must read his works again. The suggestions from others on this thread have inspired me to go to the library or download onto my Kindle.
I am almost the same age as Althouse and have resigned myself to the fact that more and more of the famous and friends who will be dying, will be people that I know of who affected my life and people that know personally. A sad fact of life about aging. You will lose people.
Just another person in the final queue, to that big unknown, who happened to get to the head of the line before me.
"Yes there was a problem there, the big Apple hadn't fully degenerAted as it did in the Dinkins era."
NYC started its climb up from the depths, and crime rates started dropping, during Dinkins' term.
You lie Cookie. Those are manufactured stats cooked up to support the Wash Room attendant.
Tell it to Yankel Rosenbaum.
He will certainly be missed. Best American writer of his generation.
The stats were only accurate when Comp-stat was initiated by Jack Marple. Otherwise the prescients would cook the stats. These "cooked" stats are what liberals cite.
Dinkins was a disaster much like Obama.
If you want to see what policing and crime looked like under Dinkins just look at Baltimore today.
"Which Cockburn? There are several, all related. Alexander Cockburn, deceased, was the best of them."
Yeah. He was just wonderful. I remember how heartbroken the shit was in '89, when the Berlin Wall came down and all his Commie dreams started circling the toilet.
Tim in Vermont
While I loved the Sot-Weed Factor, and laughed immensely, I never much cared for anything else by Barth. The Scheherazade book was OK but definitely not Giles. A one book wonder IMO.
Bay Area Guy said......but the best parts were Chuck Yeager and the fighter jockeys at Edwards, not the astronauts.
That was by design.
Putting a man on top of an ICBM emptied our treasury for the mere privilege of planting a flag on an orbiting satellite.
The interesting part was teaching these gomers orbital mechanics. But people who know orbital mechanics are married to church ladies. Well, until the church ladies get their three kids and throw the bum out.
Whatever you say, Sangfroid Heel....
And in the case of Alexander Cockburn, the horse apple didn't fall far from the horse's ass. He was the son of Claude Cockburn:
"Cockburn was attacked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell accused Cockburn of being under the control of the Communist Party and was critical of the way Cockburn reported the Barcelona May Days. According to the editor of a volume of his writings on Spain, Cockburn formed a personal relationship with Mikhail Koltsov, "then the foreign editor of Pravda and, in Cockburn's view, 'the confidant and mouthpiece and direct agent of Stalin in Spain'."
A scion of an aristocratic family who devoted his life to an vile and anti-human creed. Wonderful people, according to Cook.
I know of Claud Cockburn, but I know nothing of his writing or other activities. (Except that he wrote a novel later made into a movie with Humprhey Bogart, BEAT THE DEVIL.)
Alexander Cockburn, I reiterate, was a wonderful writer and journalist, passionate, but wry.
Bruce Cockburn is a lefty too, but at least he recorded Wondering Where the Lions Are
One of my favorites. I read Bonfire when it came out and for a long time thought it was as good as any book I'd ever read (it did peter out a bit at the end).
just about the best thing he ever wrote was one of the first things he ever wrote - the article that made him famous. it was about Junior Johnson, a NASCAR driver, running moonshine in ~ Randolph county in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. google last american hero tom wolfe essay to find it in esquire.
Putting a man on top of an ICBM emptied our treasury for the mere privilege of planting a flag on an orbiting satellite.
One of my classmates was a former Air Force fighter pilot (F 89s) and was recruited for the Astronaut program.
He said, not only no but hell no.
He had his 85th birthday last week. Going strong.
Ah, that's too bad. I was thinking of him the other day because I took a picture in my living room and noticed that I could see Bonfire of the Vanities clearly on the bookshelf in the background. I took it off the shelf today to read when I saw this news. He was in incredible talent.
Cookie said ... "The wrong Tom Wolfe."
As much as I hate to admit it, this is one time that Cookie is right. "You Can't Go Home Again" was written by Thomas Wolfe who was a generation earlier than Tom Wolfe.
He was also a lot more depressing.
"It irks me to no end that I can't get my kids to read these 3 books, but I've told Bay Area Gal, that when I go, I want these books in my casket -- in the rare event that in the afterlife they let you read."
That's an interesting topic: do you want anything with you in your casket? I told my husband to slip my father's ashes into mine because I don't know what else to do with them. Unless I come up with something, there could be all sorts of people's ashes in my casket if I live a long time. Everyone else in the family wants to be cremated. In a few thousand years someone can dig up my grave and say, "It's the damnedest thing. We don't know what sort of religious beliefs this person had, but it appears that she was buried with a bunch of pots of ashes. Perhaps these are the remains of animal sacrifices performed on behalf of the spirit of the dead." Or maybe Jesus comes back before them, and all the people are bodily resurrected, and we're all standing on top of each other when we come to.
I really liked the white suit thing. Nice trademark outfit.
Dust Bunny Queen said..." am almost the same age as Althouse and have resigned myself to the fact that more and more of the famous and friends who will be dying, will be people that I know of who affected my life and people that know personally. A sad fact of life about aging. You will lose people. "
I am right with you, DBQ. I am the same age and when I was young my biggest heroes were the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo astronauts. I followed every flight. "The Right Stuff" was one of my favorite books and movies. All those astronauts who remain are in their 80s pr 90s now and a couple leave us every year. Of the 12 men to walk on the moon, I think only 5 are left. In just a few years it will be none. I had a very nice visit with my favorite astronaut, John Young, at a local alumni event a few years ago and he autographed some pictures for my kids. Was very sorry to see him pass on a few months ago.
Another New Journalist is Gay Talese, also a snappy dresser.
Althouse, I just heard this comment at the end of the remembrance of Tom Wolfe on NPR's All Things Considered: "What bloggers have done for journalism, Tom Wolfe did it first, he did it better, and he did it 30 years before anybody else."
I am almost the same age as Althouse and have resigned myself to the fact that more and more of the famous and friends who will be dying, will be people that I know of who affected my life and people that know personally. A sad fact of life about aging. You will lose people.
I reconciled myself to this fact, but it still sucks. Not so bad when they’re older, but in the past few months I lost two who were still in their fifties and much younger than I.
“As much as I hate to admit it, this is one time that Cookie is right.”
The original comment was very obviously a joke. Well, not so obvious to all, apparently.
Tim in vermont said...”I remember reading The Sot Weed Factor in a single sitting. Never read a novel that way before or since.”
That’s John Barth’s work. He’s still around as far as I know.
@Etienne,
Putting a man on top of an ICBM emptied our treasury for the mere privilege of planting a flag on an orbiting satellite.
Darnit! I was told that the Commies were gonna weaponize space!
I have been mislead.
Sad to hear it, but Tom Wolfe *was* 87 - which is a nice old age.
I loved almost all his books, especially "The Painted Word" "Bonfire" and "The Right Stuff". He's later novels weren't as good - which is pretty standard with writers.
"A Man in Full" had some great PARTS - but just wasn't consistently great like "Bonfire".
I had a big laugh when Updike, Mailer, and somebody else, attacked Wolfe for being a "Bad Novelist". My dear, Vanity of the Bonfires may be a bestseller *sniff* but its not "great literature" - like *our* novels.
Wolfe pointed American novelists in the right direction, i.e. stop the naval-gazing and writing 1001 versions of a writer/college professor in mid-life crisis - and go out and write "Big" Novels about the outside world. Of course, they refused.
I have a feeling that like "Lord of the Rings" - "Bonfire of Vanities" will be read 50 years from now, while some of the Nobel Prize winning crap will be completely forgotten.
Already, when I talk to people about Saul Bellow - They're like "Who the hell is that?"
They know about Mailer, because he was a "Wild and Crazy guy" - like getting into fights on TV late night shows. But his novels? Nope.
Vidal and Capote - same thing. Most probably know them as TV circus clowns or for their bitchy remarks or non-fiction.
How many people read Vidal or Capote for their fiction?
Capote would always twist the knife and say Vidal would be forgotten since he never wrote that ONE book that will last. And i think that's right. But I also think its right about Capote, unless you count his NON-fiction "In Cold Blood".
Speaking to the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association in Chicago in January 1982, Attorney General William French Smith referred to the epigram "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge" as "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy." link
I simply don't know why people keep crediting Gell-Mann with that same notion; he was 20 years behind Knoll.
I guess it's because CalTech physicists are worshiped like gods.
I suppose that with such a high population post-baby boom and the explosion of American culture they came from in the 1930s to 1970s we're bound to get many high-profile deaths in recent years. The shame of it is how few people of a stature anywhere near as great there are to replace them.
Reagan's conservative revolution really did make us a much more insular, insecure, unimaginative people, didn't it?
Gore Vidal's novel "Burr" was pretty good. It will be remembered.
I have read Bonfire of the Vanities every three years since I discovered it in the 90 s. And Tom Wolfe autographed my copy of I Am Charlotte Simmons
His works predated most of the cultural experiences I was lucky enough to be born into by the time I would have been interested in reading them. But an early 2000s/late 1990s thing he did called Hooking Up was really good. It was a lament on the transient and transactional nature of young adult relationships in the internet age. Really well-written, astute, descriptive and critical stuff.
Concerning Bellow, I always got the sense that he was writing for English Lit majors and graduate students. I did not enjoy his fiction. I don't think it was meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be discussed by college students. You were supposed to find deep meaning in his books and then write term papers about it.
Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel ... not You Can't Go Home Again.
"You were supposed to find deep meaning in his books and then write term papers about it."
Well said. I suppose Bellow achieved his objective: Nobel Prize.
Reagan's conservative revolution really did make us a much more insular, insecure, unimaginative people, didn't it?
No.
Roughcoat said...
No.
It's easy (and just like a conservative) to assert without evidence. Harder, and less conservative, to back it up.
Music was in decline by the 1980s. Save for a brief creative spell of a rebound in the 1990s, this trend continued unabated... now into the current cesspoolsewer that is EDM.
I imagine the same could be said for art.
The only thing that started doing well after the uptight Reaganites was comedy. (Probably not surprising, given that its the wellspring of satire). And a couple decent sitcoms to distract us with it - Seinfeld, TBBT, etc.
Good luck on the case you were never serious about making in rebuttal of that.
For those who like to read obits, the one in The Guardian is very nice. Especially since it was written by a friend of TW's, a friend that died several years ago. Nice that he got the byline.
Doug
Sorry, but Thomas Wolfe wrote both.
Assert without evidence. Example: " Reagan's conservative revolution really did make us a much more insular, insecure, unimaginative people, didn't it?"
It's easy (and just like a conservative) to assert without evidence.
After which you go on to make assertions without evidence.
"How many people read Vidal or Capote for their fiction?"
I've read two of Gore Vidal's novels: KALKI and MESSIAH, both stories of messianic figures and the cults that form around them. They're both very good...one written in the 50s, the other in the 70s.
After which you go on to make assertions without evidence.
Only if you consider observations about the cultural history of the United States from 1980 to 2010 to be "unevidenced."
But go on. Wallow in the cultural wasteland that you and your reality tv show host president have created and tell me about all those cultural achievements you found after the uptight Reaganites that in any way rival what came in America before.
And BTW, it's ok to just shut up when you're losing a debate instead of just getting bitchy about it, you know?
During and post the Reagan era the American novel got better and better. We had Richard Ford, Tom McGuane, Cormac McCarthy (Bloom called his "Blood "Meridian" the best novel since Moby Dick), Mark Helprin, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Larry McMurtry, John Irving, Pat Conroy, Don Delillo, Anne Tyler. Just a few of the very good to great writers of literary fiction in those years. All American. To add foreign writers would expand the list of first rate names.
Reagan's conservative revolution really did make us a much more insular, insecure, unimaginative people, didn't it?
The band "X" thought so, back in 1980: It was better before they voted for what's his name...this is supposed to be the new world
But Exene Cervenka recently embraced Donald Trump.
Capote' s short fiction is quite good. Have never been able to aside Vidal but God knows I tried. He may be one of those I could go back to and find I could read them straight through. Took five tries for Proust, probably two for The Magic Mountain, certain books are not ready for us until certain times in our lives.
Music was in decline by the 1980s. Save for a brief creative spell of a rebound in the 1990s, this trend continued unabated... now into the current cesspoolsewer that is EDM.
Eh, that's just a "get off my lawn" complaint. Music was carefully directed an packaged from the business side since at least the late '50s. I would argue it reached its nadir in the '60s and didn't really start going downhill again until the mid-2000s.
X's guitarist, Billy Zoom, straddled the stage like Larry Craig.
Jeez, I left out Raymond Carver from the list of RR era writers of merit. Brett Easton Ellis. Jay McInerney. Updike's Rabbit years,
"How many people read Vidal or Capote for their fiction?"
I've read two of Gore Vidal's novels: KALKI and MESSIAH
His "Burr" was quite good.
I love the smell of elitist bullshit.
Reading is elitist bullshit. LOL. Explains a lot.
Reading's not elitist. (Although I suppose that's become a pretty subjective term nowadays). I prefer the classics. Although it's hard to deny that with the amount of info out there there's increasing pressure to pack more and more culture into more and more media. Even films seem less adequate nowadays than they once were. I find myself watching more documentaries than ever and really stretching to find decent creative content - not that there's a lack of competition for it. With the number of streaming services and in-house production studios the pressure for evermore entertaining and even quality video content is immense.
Good piece on Wolfe by John Podhoretz in the NY Post; I especially like this:
What saves Wolfe’s work from descending into nihilism is the extraordinary American exuberance of his prose — his work reads as if Huck Finn grew up and went to Yale and got a Ph.D. (as Wolfe did) before realizing he could not be “sivilized” to stand in front of a classroom and just teach. He needed to light out for the uncivilized territories of the five boroughs, where the American elite spent and continue to spend their lives playing status games they cannot win.
The authors and the whole conceit of literary fiction is elitist. Millions of people read books every day. Hundreds read the overpraised authors you cite.
There are literally hundreds of authors who sold millions of books who are not on your list.
Luckily with the advent of direct publishing and Ebooks the tyranny of the elite is over and many more people have the ability to publish and be popular.
I read Bonfier of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone. I read it in book form, too, when it came out. Laugh out loud funny.
"The whole conceit of literary fiction is elitist." O horrors--not that! We musn't aspire to anything the average slob can't relate to!
It's okay, Ann. We still have Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer.
What's gone, with Wolfe, or going out with him, is a more important thing, the audience, a certain sort of audience.
It doesn't matter if independents publish freely if no-one reads.
Or can read and understand at that level.
"Reading is elitist bullshit."
Reading is for nerds (aka losers).
"Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers" are two essays I have kept to heart during my time both working in Fine Arts and Social Services.
He Hit the Nail on the Head in both those areas.
There on lies the point, buwaya, you can see what a,mess New York magazine has degenerated into.
There was a great writer and singer facundo cabral he happened to be on the left, but he has great insight into human nature he was killed in a drive by in Guatemala some years back by a minion of a,Costa Rican drug dealer.
Here's some of the crime, if not the man:
http://www.ticotimes.net/2016/04/07/prison-sentence-murder-facundo-cabral
"Yes there was a problem there, the big Apple hadn't fully degenerAted as it did in the Dinkins era."
NYC started its climb up from the depths, and crime rates started dropping, during Dinkins' term.
Sure, Cookie. That's why "Death Wish " was so popular.
Back to blood was being written in the shadow of both the 2012 election and events in sanford. As usual solve found two interesting sherpas to navigate him through the Casablanca of the Caribbean a disgraced fmr Miami Herald reported and a fmr Miami police spokesman, who was in failing health.
Our overload society has been fed much too much fiction: we are fat with fiction, morbidly obese with too many books, too many movies, too many TV shows, too many stories. Fiction is wallpaper, around us always. There is so much fiction we have no room for history: there is so much fiction we have no need for history.
There is so much fiction that we no longer have to actually read it, we glean it in our gills from conversations and catch-phrases, from reviews and remakes and reticulation: osmosis, plankton, dandelion fluff.
Things Shakespeare never wrote, Part One:
A good car chase scene.
-LWL
From the fmr he took a jaundiced view of out cross straits civil war, some idiosyncrasies like the botanicals and aspects of Haitian culture, from the latter an examinatiob of the war against crime and the cultures which halper it, also the extravagance of the art world is,in sharp relief.
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