Tom Wolfe

American · 1930 to 2018

Born Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. on 2 March 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, he was the son of Thomas Wolfe Sr., an agronomist and editor of The Southern Planter, and Helen Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer. At St Christopher's School he was student council president, paper editor, and a star pitcher; he later turned down Princeton for Washington and Lee, then earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale with a dissertation on communist organising among American writers. In 1952 he had a three-day tryout with the New York Giants, was cut for a weak fastball, and turned to journalism instead. The breakthrough came in 1963 when he sent his Esquire editor an all-night memo on Southern California hot-rod culture; the editor stripped off the salutation and published it as written, giving the title essay of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). He named the new style New Journalism: scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, multiple points of view, and what he called the status-life symbols people surround themselves with. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) followed Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across America; Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) skewered Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther fundraiser; The Right Stuff (1979) made single-combat warriors of the Mercury Seven astronauts and was filmed by Philip Kaufman in 1983. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), sold more than three million copies and gave the eighties one of its few lasting books. He wore a white three-piece suit nearly every day for fifty years, calling it neo-pretentious. He died of pneumonia in Manhattan on 14 May 2018, aged eighty-eight.