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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.
Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word. The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening."
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."
Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 he began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's Magazine called "In Our Time." The book In Our Time , published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House, about the world of American architecture.
In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.
In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter—as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.
In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full, was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.
A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves—along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one—provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.
In October 2000 Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled Hooking Up. It included Ambush at Fort Bragg and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, is now available in paperback from Picador.
Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, TommyFiction
Non-fiction
""Journalism and New Journalism
Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and eventually worked for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune among others. While there he experimented with using fictional techniques in feature stories.
During a New York newspaper strike, he approached Esquire Magazine about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of Southern California. He struggled with writing the article and or Byron Dobell
suggested that Wolfe send his notes to him so they could work together
on the article. Wolfe sat down and wrote Dobell a letter saying
everything he wanted to say about the subject, ignoring all conventions
of journalism. Dobell simply removed the salutation "Dear Byron" from
the top of the letter and published the notes as the article. The
result was The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
This was the inception of New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques,
mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed
reporting. One of the most striking examples of this idea is Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The book, while being a narrative account of the adventures of the Merry Pranksters, is also highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia, free association,
and eccentric use of punctuation - such as multiple exclamation marks
and italics - to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers.
As well as his own forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe
also ed a collection of New Journalism with EW Johnson, published
in 1975 and entitled simply The New Journalism. This book brought together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S Thompson, Norman Mailer
and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of
journalism that incorporated literary techniques and could be
considered literature.
Non-fiction
In 1965 a collection of his articles in this style was published under the title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
and Wolfe's fame grew. He wrote on popular culture, architecture,
politics, and other topics that interested him. His defining work from
this era is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which epitomized the decade of the 1960s for many. Although a conservative in many ways and certainly not a hippie, Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.
In 1970 he published two essays in book form: Radical Chic, a biting account of a party given by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party, and Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers,
about the practice of using racial intimidation ("mau-mauing") to
extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers").
The phrase "radical chic" soon became a popular derogatory term for
upper class leftism.
In 1979 Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts.
Famously following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy,
exploits, he likened these heroes to "single combat champions" of an
earlier era, going forth to battle on behalf of their country. In 1983
the book was adapted as a film.
Wolfe also wrote two highly critical pop histories of painting and architecture, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus To Our House, in 1975 and 1981. The books mocked the excessive reliance by the art world on faddish critical theories.
Fiction
Several other books followed before Wolfe's first satirical novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987, having previously been serialized in Rolling Stone
magazine. This book chronicles the spectacular rise and fall of a New
York bond trader named Sherman McCoy against a backdrop of 1980s New
York. Critics praised the book in particular for its vivid evocation of
New York's social, racial, and economic tensions. It was a runaway
popular success, becoming one of the bestselling and most widely talked
about books of the 1980s. Wolfe received $5 million for the film rights to Bonfire of the Vanities, the most ever earned by an author at that time. In 1984, Wolfe won the prestigious Dos Passos Prize for literature from Longwood University.
He followed this with a notorious and controversial 1989 essay in Harper's Magazine entitled Stalking the Billion-footed Beast,
which criticized modern American novelists for failing to fully engage
with their subjects, and suggested that the only thing that could save
modern literature was a greater reliance on journalistic technique.
This essay was widely seen as an attack on the mainstream literary
establishment, and a thinly veiled boast that Wolfe's work was vastly
superior to many more highly regarded authors.
Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread
interest in his second work of fiction. This project took him more than
eleven years to complete; A Man in Full was published finally in 1998. The book's reception was not universally positive, despite glowing reviews published in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. An enormous 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. John Updike wrote a critical review for Harpers,
in which he wrote that the novel "amounts to Entertainment, not
literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." This touched
off an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media between
Wolfe and Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. Wolfe would later publish an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges."
After publishing Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces) in 2001, he followed up with his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004).
The book chronicles sexual promiscuity on contemporary American college
campuses and met with a mostly tepid response by critics, though its
accuracy and focus were praised by many college students. The book also
won praise from many political conservatives who saw the book's
disturbing account of college sexuality as revealing moral decline. The
novel won a dubious award from the London-based Literary Review "to
draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of
redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel," though
the author later explained that such sexual references were
deliberately clinical. ""A cult is a religion with no political power.
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
America - It is a fabulous country, the only
fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen,
but where they happen all the time.
At the outset, at least, all three groups had
something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered
3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has
failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly
failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it,
he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few
men ever know.
If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed.
If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole
of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men
ever know.
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are
united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and
beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do
terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make
sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem
solved.
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press,
including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new
artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you
the scores.
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three
hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that...
Masters of the Universe.
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
Pornography was the great vice of the Seventies;
plutography - the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich - the the
great vice of the Eighties.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style;
in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions - Politics, like
Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is
actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an
example of freedom from religion.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects
anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is
completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows
what has happened.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the
belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon,
peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and
inevitable fact of human existence.
There are some people who have the quality of
richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they
touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of
the spirit.
There has been a time on earth when poets had been
young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the
tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius
was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
We are always acting on what has just finished
happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're
in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of
the past.
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top
of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn
rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
You can't go home again.
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