Tom Wolfe RIP

Just the other night I was looking over my bookcase and pulled out a book I bought a long time ago called The Devil's Candy, about the making of the disastrous movie version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

How ironic then, that, very next day, Tom Wolfe died here in NYC, aged 87.

Starting in the 1960s, along with writers like Gay Talese and others, Wolfe was an originator of the "New Journalism", a style of non-fiction where reporters would embed themselves with their subjects and write long, probing articles and books in a highly personal, provocative, almost literary way. Wolfe became the most popular New Journalist of all, writing about the heroes and anti-heroes of American life, from hippies to astronauts like Ken Kesey and the Yippies in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Black Panthers in Radical Chic (a term he coined), the Mercury astronauts in The Right Stuff (his most acclaimed work). 

Wolfe's observations were always satirical, never sentimental; always honest, no puffery. He was "politically incorrect" but never offensive -- he held the mirror up to nature, oftentimes brutally, and did so in wild, hyperbolic prose. Wolfe loved periods and italicizes and fast, whirling sentences -- there was a rock'n'roll sensibility to his words, an energy that hit your "solar plexus" (to use a term Wolfe repeated ad nauseum in his writing).

In the 1980s, Wolfe switched from journalism to fiction, publishing his legendary NYC novel The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. I've written a lot about this book over the years -- a novel that presents NYC as hellish landscape of greed, crime, and yes, vanity -- so I won't say any more except that it serves both as a piece of great entertainment and a lacerating commentary of this city at that time. Wolfe wrote a few more novels, most notably A Man in Full in 1998, but none equaled Bonfire -- his last few novels received poor reviews and sales -- and he became a relic of the 20th century. But he influenced endures.

Wolfe also became famous for his trademark white suit that he always wore in public. I saw him speak several times over the years and he always donned the suit with complimentary white reading glasses. 

And I ever spoke to him once. 

Once, at a book signing, I mentioned that he had been a big influence to me and that I wanted to write as well. "What kind of things do you like to write?" he asked. I said fiction. He wished me luck -- and, years later, I published my first novel Leaving New York (which you can look to and purchase on the right-hand of this blog). 

Tom Wolfe inspired me to do it and, for that, I thank him  -- and for everything he ever wrote.