Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s incorporating literary techniques. Wolfe began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. 

In 1979, he published the influential book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which was made into a 1983 film of the same name directed by Philip Kaufman. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and became a commercial success. Unfortunately, its adaptation as a motion picture of the same name, directed by Brian De Palma, was a critical and commercial failure.

Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel to capture the broad reach of American society. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which described the culture of 19th-century England. In 1981, he ceased his other work to concentrate on the novel. Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of the homicide squad in The Bronx. 

While the research came quickly, he encountered difficulty in writing. Wolfe wrote to Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone, to overcome his writer's block to propose an idea drawn from Charles Dickens and Thackeray: to serialize his novel. Wenner offered Wolfe around $200,000 to serialize his work. The frequent deadline pressure gave him the motivation he had sought, and from July 1984 to August 1985, he published a new installment in each biweekly issue of Rolling Stone. 

Later Wolfe was unhappy with his "very public first draft" and thoroughly revised his work, even changing his protagonist, Sherman McCoy. Wolfe had initially made him a writer but recast him as a bond salesman. Wolfe researched and revised for two years, and his The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on bestseller lists and earning praise from the literary establishment on which Wolfe had long heaped scorn.

Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread interest in his second. This novel took him over 11 years to complete; A Man in Full was published in 1998. The book's reception was not universally favorable, though it received glowing reviews in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. An initial printing of 1.2 million copies was announced, and the book stayed at number one on The New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks.

Noted author John Updike wrote a critical review for The New Yorker, complaining that the novel "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." His comments sparked an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media among Wolfe and Updike and authors John Irving and Norman Mailer, who also entered the fray. The novel was selected to be adapted into a television series by Netflix in 2021.

In 2001, Wolfe published an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges." That year he also published Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella Ambush at Fort Bragg). He published his third novel; I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), chronicling the decline of a poor, bright scholarship student from Alleghany County, North Carolina, after attending an elite university. He conveys an institution filled with snobbery, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and sexual promiscuity. The novel met with a mostly tepid response from critics.

Many social conservatives praised it because its portrayal revealed widespread moral decline. The novel won a Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the London-based Literary Review, a prize established "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel." Wolfe later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical. 

Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, and John Steinbeck. Wolfe announced in early 2008 that he was leaving his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His fourth novel, Back to Blood, was published in October 2012 by Little, Brown, and Company. 

According to The New York Times, Wolfe was paid nearly US$7 million for the book. According to the publisher, Back to Blood is about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first." Unfortunately, the book was released to mixed reviews. Back to Blood was an even bigger commercial failure than I Am Charlotte Simmons.