Tom Wolfe: A Participant-Observer Writes About The People Of America

This is the first year we remember Wolfe's birthday without him. His death at 88 in May of last year brought to an end a career that blazed with New Journalism and complex, often controversial, novels. Though he may be gone from the American scene, his perceptive window on late 20th century culture is well worth remembering.

Wolfe's earlier works seem written as much for entertainment as for traditional reportorial honesty and often involve not only the writer's observation but also his participation. And there are those long daydream passages of vivid description that end with a quick snap back to reality. As he worked more and more in fiction his style retained muted elements of the "wildness" that made his early "journalism" amazingly popular into the 1990's.

The author is sartorial splendor in his Manhattan apartment 

Today the first wave of Gonzos - a term coined around 1970 by Hunter S. Thompson to describe a wing of New Journalism advocates - is all but gone with Wolfe's passing.  For him it was a long way from The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to tackling the Great American Novel.  He was always quite happy interpreting the American experience as an outsider looking into other worlds and he certainly surpassed Thompson and others in his school with a matured Gonzo style.

These days Wolfe's work - especially the novels - still make news but I believe we should always remember his entertaining journalism, especially the work that chronicled our cultural history in the critical years from early 1960's to the mid-1970's. In those years he wrote the following titles:

The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
The Pump House Gang (1968)
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)
The New Journalism (1974) edited with E.W. Johnson
The Painted Word (1975)
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976)

He capped the 1970's with, The Right Stuff, his fascinating look at the nation's first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, and program that put most of them into space. Although he had already achieved fame as a writer the publication of The Right Stuff and the film by the same name that followed in 1983 ensured his place in American literature. 

In 2012 Wolfe took on the immigration theme and the Cuban-Americans community dominating the scene in Miami. Back to Blood hit the market with high expectations but performed poorly. This article reprinted from New York Magazine appeared with the release of the novel and remains a pleasing blend of biography and book.  His last major publication was The Freedom of Speech, a non-fiction work appearing in August 2016. 

Wolfe has left us with a huge amount of literature. Let us immerse ourselves in this great wealth of observations of the American experience Tom Wolfe assembled for us. At least, we'll be entertained by a fine writer/reporter. At most, we'll learn much not only about our cultural history but also ourselves. 

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Wolfe, New York Magazine

Text:
wikipedia.org