Tom Wolfe

His father studied soil for a living and edited The Southern Planter, and Richmond schooled the son in the manners he would spend a career noticing in other people. He turned down Princeton for Washington and Lee, ran the sports page, helped start a literary magazine, and wrote an undergraduate thesis titled A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America. He also pitched, well enough that the New York Giants gave him a tryout in 1952 and cut him after three days, which he blamed on his fastball. So he took a doctorate at Yale instead, on Communist organizing among American writers, and the department rejected the dissertation before accepting it in 1957. He went to work at a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts.

During the 1962 to 1963 New York newspaper strike he pitched Esquire a piece on California custom cars, could not write it, and on the eve of the deadline typed his editor a letter explaining what he would have said. Byron Dobell cut off the salutation and printed the letter as reportage. That was the method from then on: saturation reporting, scene by scene, the whole social position of a man carried in the brand of his shoes. He rode with Ken Kesey for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, sat in Leonard Bernstein's apartment at a Black Panther fundraiser for Radical Chic, and wrote The Right Stuff about the Mercury astronauts, which took the National Book Award. The Bonfire of the Vanities ran in Rolling Stone in installments before it was a book.

The 1970 volume that gave the language radical chic also carried Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, on Black activists frightening money out of welfare officials, and the pairing shows where he aimed. He rejected the right-wing label and said it came from the things he mocked. When A Man in Full arrived in 1998, John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that it amounted to entertainment and not literature, John Irving compared reading it to reading a bad newspaper, and Norman Mailer supplied a metaphor involving sex with a very large woman. Wolfe answered with an essay calling the three of them stooges and two of them old piles of bones. In 2016 he published a book against Darwin and Noam Chomsky that scientists said had no research behind it.

He died of an infection in Manhattan on May 14, 2018, at 88. The suit outlasted almost everything: bought in 1962 for summer wear, found too heavy for it, worn through winter instead, and kept for 56 years because, he said, it made him a man from Mars who knew nothing and was eager to know. What survives most reliably is the vocabulary — the right stuff, radical chic, the Me Decade, good ol' boy, statusphere. On the writing itself nothing is settled. Kurt Vonnegut and Harold Bloom admired him. The critic James Wood saw big subjects, yards of flapping exaggeration, and no real human variety inside.

Tom Wolfe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby book
  The collection built around the Esquire piece that began as a missed deadline 1965
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book
  Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, written by a man who had tried marijuana once 1968
• Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers book
  Two essays — a Black Panther fundraiser at Leonard Bernstein's and the welfare bureaucracy 1970
• The Right Stuff book
  The Mercury Seven as single combat warriors. National Book Award, and a 1983 film 1979
• From Bauhaus to Our House book
  His case against modernist architecture 1981
• The Bonfire of the Vanities book
  Serialized in Rolling Stone in 1984 and 1985 before publication as a novel 1987

• March 2, 1930 aged 0 Born in Richmond to an agronomist who edited a farm journal
• 1951 aged ~21 Graduates cum laude from Washington and Lee He had turned down Princeton to go there.
• 1952 aged ~22 Cut by the New York Giants after a three-day pitching tryout He blamed his fastball and enrolled at Yale.
• 1957 aged ~27 Finishes his Yale doctorate after the department rejects the first draft
• 1962 aged ~32 Buys the white suit and finds it too heavy for summer
• 1963 aged ~33 Esquire prints his missed-deadline letter as an article His editor Byron Dobell simply removed the salutation.
• 1970 aged ~40 Radical Chic gives American politics a permanent insult
• 1979 aged ~49 The Right Stuff wins the National Book Award
• 1987 aged ~57 The Bonfire of the Vanities is published as a novel
• May 14, 2018 aged 88 Dies of an infection in Manhattan at 88

• Leonard Bernstein 1918–1990
  Conductor, composer, and educator who brought classical music to mass audiences and reshaped American musical theater. wrote up his Black Panther fundraiser
• Chuck Yeager 1923–2020
  Air Force test pilot who first exceeded the speed of sound in level flight in 1947. central figure of The Right Stuff
• John Glenn 1921–2016
  First American to orbit Earth and later the oldest person to fly in space at age 77. wrote about him as a Mercury astronaut
• John Updike 1932–2009
  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose Rabbit series chronicled the anxieties of suburban American men. literary antagonist
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. literary antagonist
• Noam Chomsky b. 1928
  Linguist and political activist whose theories revolutionized the study of language and cognitive science. attacked in The Kingdom of Speech