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” and “A Man in Full,” has died.
The Richmond native was 88.
Wolfe’s literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, told The Associated Press that he died of an infection Monday in a New York City hospital. Further details were not immediately available.
One of the most well-known novelists and writers to come out of Richmond, Wolfe grew up on the city’s North Side, in the Sherwood Park neighborhood off Brookland Parkway.
He attended Ginter Park School and later St. Christopher’s School, where he edited the school newspaper and graduated in 1947.
After graduating from Washington and Lee University, he set off for Yale and a doctorate in American studies.
But he turned away from academia to take a job at a newspaper in Springfield, Mass. His journalism career led to The Washington Post, The New York Herald Tribune and eventually magazines and a string of best-selling books.
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, stylized 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, as well as the “Me” generation, defining the self-absorbed baby boomers of the 1970s.
“He was an incredible writer,” Talese told the AP on Tuesday. “And you couldn’t imitate him. When people tried, it was a disaster. They should have gotten a job at a butcher’s shop.”
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Wolfe grew up at 3307 Gloucester Road in Richmond’s Sherwood Park neighborhood. Ken Storey, a Richmonder, bought the house in 1991.
Storey wrote the famous author about the house and received a surprising response — a long letter from Wolfe about what it was like to grow up in Richmond in the 1930s.
Wolfe described his old neighborhood as “absolute paradise for children.” He wrote fondly of riding his bicycle at night along Loxley Road with his friends and watching the fireflies come out among the mimosa blossoms. He also recalled watching the fireworks at the Virginia State Fair from his bedroom window, when the fairgrounds were located just a few blocks away on the future site of The Diamond.
He told The New York Times that as a boy he thanked God every night for being born “in the greatest city in the greatest state in the greatest country. Just think of all the people not fortunate enough to be born in Richmond, Virginia.”
Wolfe came back to Richmond often to speak at St. Christopher’s.
“He taught them precision and flair,” said Ron Smith, writer in residence at St. Christopher’s. “Our students were fascinated by him. Tom was a bit of a showman, as well as a fine writer. They were interested in his clothing as much as his writing.”
Smith said that Wolfe discovered at Washington and Lee University that he could get a strong reaction out of people by dressing up. “He enjoyed provoking people. People on campus would stop and ask, ‘Why are you dressed up like that?’”
In an interview with Time magazine, Wolfe said he bought his first white suit after he moved to New York, not long before his first book was published in the 1960s. While a white suit wouldn’t be unusual in Richmond, in New York, it caused a sensation and became his signature look.
In 2011, Wolfe was the guest speaker at St. Christopher’s centennial celebration.
“The message of his visit was: If you are a writer, then you have to get out and experience the world. You can’t isolate yourself. You have to get out of the building; that was his expression,” said Delores Smith, director of development at St. Christopher’s. “He said you had to experience the world with open eyes.”
George McVey, former head of school at St. Christopher’s, struck up a lifelong friendship with Wolfe.
“When I first started as the head of school, our director of development said, ‘Let’s have a party in New York and see if we can have it at Tom Wolfe’s house,’” McVey recalled. Wolfe agreed to host the party, and a friendship soon blossomed between both families.
“My wife, Nan, became close friends and our friendship grew, as did our kids and everything else,” McVey said. The Wolfes would rent a house in Southampton, N.Y., every summer, and the McVeys would visit them for a week.
For many years, the Wolfes would host parties for visiting students or alumni from St. Christopher’s and St. Catherine’s at their home in New York.
“People just loved being in his presence,” Ron Smith said.
“You could put Tom anywhere with anybody and he’d be as interested in them as if they were his closest friends,” McVey said.
“He was a Southern gentleman in the classic sense of the term, although you wouldn’t guess it from his books,” Ron Smith said. “He was always patient and attentive. He was a very Southern fellow in terms of his manners, but he had a great sense of adventure.”
Ron Smith added that “in terms of raw influence on culture, I think he was the most influential [Richmond] writer since Poe. The notion of new journalism, that you could produce nonfiction that read with the excitement — the devices and conventions — of a novel, that was pretty wild and crazy stuff. Everybody knows who Tom Wolfe was. Colleges now give degrees in creative nonfiction, and I think you could trace that way of thinking back to Tom Wolfe.”
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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 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 programs 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.”
He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th-century-style novel about contemporary New York City, and so he wrote one himself, 1987’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” It became one of the top 10 best-selling books of the 1980s.
Wolfe’s 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 LSD enthusiasts, 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.
He enjoyed the highest commercial and critical rewards. His literary honors included the American Book Award (now called the National Book Award) for “The Right Stuff,” which chronicled America’s first astronauts, and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle prize for “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
His 1998 novel “A Man in Full” was another best-seller, as well as a National Book Award nominee. Wolfe satirized college misbehavior in “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and was still at it in his 80s with “Back to Blood,” a sprawling, multicultural story of sex and honor 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 wasn’t 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, so-called 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!”
Wolfe traveled during the ’60s with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for his book on the psychedelic culture, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”
Wolfe had many detractors — including fellow writers Norman Mailer and John Updike and the critic James Wood, who panned Wolfe’s “big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability.”
But his fans included millions of book-buyers, literary critics and fellow authors.
“He knows everything. ... I wish he had headed the Warren Commission,” novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote of Wolfe. “We might then have caught a glimpse of our nation.”
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Wolfe had an unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before heading to Yale University for graduate school. In 1957, he joined the Springfield paper and instantly fell in love with journalism.
New York was his dream, and by 1962 he was working at the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune. But he had a longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style.
No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.
As a Newsweek story put it in 1965: “For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!’”
That same year, his first book appeared: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of 23 of his articles that included the title piece, his seminal work on custom cars. In 1968, another collection — “The Pump-House Gang” — appeared, as did his book on the Pranksters.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that Wolfe turned his attention to fiction. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex. The book received poor reviews and was a commercial disappointment, and other recent works, including the nonfiction “The Kingdom of Speech,” were not well-received.
But he was never without ideas for future projects. In a 2016 interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, at the age of 86, he was certain that he still had a book — or more — to write.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I have a number in mind. There’s always something happening that’s interesting and important just in terms of social status.”
In 1978, Wolfe married Sheila Berger, art director of Harper’s magazine. They had two children, Alexandra and Tommy.
Information from The Associated Press and Richmond Times-Dispatch staff writer Colleen Curran was used in this report.