Tom Wolfe, the white-suited wizard of “New Journalism” who exuberantly chronicled American culture from the Merry Pranksters through the space race before turning his satiric wit to such novels as The Bonfire Of The Vanities, has died aged 88.
Wolfe’s literary agent Lynn Nesbit told The Associated Press that he died of an infection in a New York City hospital on Monday. Further details were not immediately available.
An acolyte of French novelist Emile Zola and other authors of “realistic” fiction, the stylishly attired Wolfe was an American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it.
Along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, he helped demonstrate that journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
His hyperbolic, stylised writing work was a gleeful fusillade of exclamation points, italics and improbable words.
An ingenious phrase maker, he helped brand such expressions as “radical chic” for rich liberals’ fascination with revolutionaries, and the “Me” generation, defining the self-absorbed baby boomers of the 1970s.
Wolfe was both a literary upstart, sneering at the perceived stuffiness of the publishing establishment, and an old-school gentleman who went to the best schools and encouraged Michael Lewis and other younger writers.
When attending promotional luncheons with fellow authors, he would make a point of reading their latest work.
“What I hope people know about him is that he was a sweet and generous man,” Lewis, known for such books as Moneyball and The Big Short, told the AP in an email on Tuesday.
“Not just a great writer but a great soul. He didn’t just help me to become a writer. He did it with pleasure.”
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programmes would kill the novel.
“So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast.
We are deeply saddened to hear of Tom Wolfe’s death. He was a brilliant essayist, pioneering journalist and author of several iconic books. His legacy will live on and our heartfelt condolences are with his family at this sad time. pic.twitter.com/HAs1C1PbrB
— Penguin Books UK (@PenguinUKBooks) May 15, 2018
He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th-century-style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, The Bonfire Of The Vanities.
His work broke countless rules but was grounded in old-school journalism, in an obsessive attention to detail that began with his first reporting job and endured for decades.
“Nothing fuels the imagination more than real facts do,” Wolfe told the AP in 1999.
“As the saying goes, ‘You can’t make this stuff up’.”
Wolfe’s interests were vast, but his narratives had a common theme.
Whether sending up the New York art world or hanging out with acid heads, Wolfe inevitably presented man as a status-seeking animal, concerned above all about the opinion of one’s peers.
Wolfe himself dressed for company – his trademark a pale three-piece suit, impossibly high shirt collar, two-tone shoes and a silk tie. And he acknowledged that he cared – very much – about his reputation.
“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,” Wolfe, who lived in a 12-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told the AP in 2012.
'You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.'– Tom Wolfe, 1931-2018 pic.twitter.com/29pVXcXBwh
— Waterstones (@Waterstones) May 15, 2018
His literary honours included the American Book Award (now called the National Book Award) for The Right Stuff and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle prize for The Bonfire Of the Vanities, one of the top 10 selling books of the 1980s.
Its 1998 follow-up A Man In Full was another best-seller and a National Book Award nominee.
Wolfe satirised college misbehaviour in I Am Charlotte Simmons and was still at it in his Eighties with Back To Blood, a sprawling, multicultural story of sex and honour set in Miami.
Wolfe, the grandson of a Confederate rifleman, began his journalism career as a reporter at the Springfield (Mass.) Union in 1957.
But it was not until the mid-1960s, while a magazine writer for New York and Esquire, that his work made him a national trendsetter.
As Wolfe helped define it, the “new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting.
He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.
“She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way,” he wrote in a typical piece, describing actress-socialite Baby Jane Holzer.
“Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened – swock! – like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of… zebra! Those motherless stripes!”