WOOD-CARVING · WOOD-CARVED FIGURINES
Tom Wolfe
Also known as: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., tom-wolfe
Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) universities. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba. In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald-Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism. In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program. In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award. "The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero."
"What is all this hernia hernia stuff?"
— from Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby, 1968
Most acclaimed
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby
1968
"In his first book—a collection that launched its author as America's foremost entertainer with something to say—Tom Wolfe took a sharp-eyed look at the American scene of the early 1960s and zeroed in on the exotic forms of status-seeking that flourished across the country from New York to Los Angeles. He observed the emergence of intriguing art forms and styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past. In the Low Rent world of the Twist, bouffant hairdos, stock car racing, and rock concerts he found not only a uniquely American energy but also an American aesthetic. In the title piece Wolfe eulogized the flamboyant kustomized kars that California teenagers designed and constructed with a single-minded artistic dedication. And through his eyes we see this new world's most stupendous manifestation: the back-lit plastic city of Las Vegas—"apart from Versailles the only architecturally uniform city in the Western World." Wolfe also sized up the defenses that the old guard rallied against this rising tide of barbarism. Whether in fashion, nightlife, child-rearing, or art-worship, its struggle to find new forms to preserve its status against the proles received ruthless and hilarious scrutiny. Illustrated by the author's own "Metropolitan Sketchbook," The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was a dazzling debut." - from [tomwolfe.com]
I am Charlotte Simmons
2004
"Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a wide-eyed, bookish freshman from a strict, devout, poor and poorly educated family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump her towering academic achievement every time." "As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont's privileged elite - her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Gellin, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus - she is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different and the exotic allure of her innocence."--BOOK JACKET.