WOLFE, Thomas Kennerly, Jr. ("Tom")

(b. 2 March 1931 in Richmond, Virginia), journalist, illustrator, and novelist who was the greatest of the New Journalists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Wolfe's father, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., was a professor of agronomy for Virginia Polytechnic Institute, a businessman who ran the Southern States Cooperative, and a journalist who edited the Southern Planter. His mother, Helen Perkins (Hughes) Wolfe, was a homemaker. As a youngster Wolfe enjoyed reading picture books and remembered being especially enamored of Honey Bear by Dixie Wilson, which told a story that blended narrative verse with illustrations in a manner he imitated as an adult author. In his teens he was attracted to Emil Ludwig's biographies and the writings of James T. Farrell, James M. Cain, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe (the 1930s novelist), and William Faulkner. He edited the newspaper for Richmond's Saint Christopher's School, from which he graduated in 1947. In the same year he entered Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he helped edit the college newspaper.

Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951 with a B.A. in English. He had pitched for the university's baseball team, and in 1952 he had a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not receive a contract offer, so he entered graduate school at Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in American studies in 1957. Tired of the academic life, he looked for work outside of academe. In December 1956, when he had completed his coursework, he found it at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union, where he worked as a cub reporter for six months before becoming a full-time reporter. He loved the work.

In June 1959 Wolfe was hired by the Washington Post. He covered local and Latin American news, winning a Washington Newspaper Guild award for his coverage of Cuba and another for his humorous coverage in writing and drawings of United State Senate debates, both in 1961. Wolfe's editors liked his work, but Wolfe believed he was being asked to write overly detailed accounts of inconsequential events. He left the newspaper in April 1962 for a job as a writer and illustrator for the New York Herald Tribune, where he began making contributions to what was then the Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine, New York, which survived the Herald Tribune's eventual bankruptcy.

The Herald Tribune was beset by a strike in 1963, putting Wolfe temporarily out of work. While researching another story, he had become interested in the hobby of modifying cars that seemed to be a way of life for some people in California, and he persuaded Esquire magazine to send him to California to research an article about them. After a few months in California, Wolfe returned home with copious notes and no idea how he would write the story. As his deadline for the article approached, he told Esquire editor Byron Dobell that he could not write the story, but illustrations for the piece were already in press and Dobell had to have the story. Thus, he told Wolfe to type up his notes for another writer to use to construct a story. Wolfe spent the night typing his notes, and Dobell ran the type-script exactly as Wolfe had produced it, full of digressions, impressionistic descriptions, and stream-of-consciousness commentary. It became the publication that launched Wolfe's literary career and was one of the most influential works of its time, imitated by numerous writers continually for decades thereafter.

The story became the title piece in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a selection of twenty-three from the more than forty articles Wolfe wrote during the two years following the Esquire publication; the book included eighteen of Wolfe's illustrations. He had found his authorial voice while writing the original article and then poured out articles for New York, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar. They featured bizarre punctuation, mellifluent displays of exotic language, side issues, and a pop culture diction—discomfiting for many critics, although careful readers found that Wolfe's stories had logical underpinnings that held together his flights of colorful vernacular.

In 1968 Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of the Merry Pranksters, a group of people crossing America on a bus with author Ken Kesey. The book exhibits the solid journalistic experience Wolfe brings to his work. Even though on its surface it is a sensational account of social dropouts abusing drugs and themselves amid the social conflicts of the 1960s, the book covers the history of LSD use during the 1960s and how drug use fit into a cultural search for altered consciousness. The book sold very well. Also published in 1968 was a second gathering of essays, The Pump House Gang, which featured Wolfe's high-flying prose style and trenchant observations on American society.

At the end of the 1960s Wolfe solidified his place as a perpetual irritant to social elitists. In 1969 members of the Black Panther party, a high-profile group of African Americans who advocated the use of violence to change society, were charged with plotting to plant bombs. Believing the charges bogus, composer and symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife held a fund-raiser for the Black Panthers in their New York apartment. Wolfe attended the party, taking shorthand notes of what he saw and heard. One of the uncomfortable aspects of Wolfe's article on the party for those who attended would be the accuracy of his quotations. Entitled "Radical Chic," the article filled the entire issue of the 8 June 1970 New York. In it he portrays the rich and well-connected people who attended the party as confused, self-indulgent, and more concerned with appearing socially correct than actually caring about the Black Panthers. They write checks to the Black Panthers who attend the party, but the Black Panthers appear demeaned just by being present in a group of people lacking real regard for them or their cause. This article and one on street gangs were combined in the book Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970).

Some readers were angry that Wolfe had revealed so much about the pretensions of rich liberals. A reputation for cruelly revealing too much about his subjects remained with him through the rest of his career. Even so, by the 1970s he had won a huge popular audience that not only purchased his journalistic books but his scholarly books on the arts, including From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). Also in the 1970s Wolfe became a family man. He married Sheila Berger, an art director of Harper's magazine, in 1978; they have two children.

In 1980 Wolfe won the National Book Award for The Right Stuff (1979), an account of America's Mercury space program of the early 1960s, which was made into a critically and commercially successful motion picture (1983). His 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities was made into a motion picture in 1990, but the movie fared poorly with critics and audiences. His latest work is A Man in Full (1998), a novel set in the center of the New South, Atlanta, Georgia. Throughout Wolfe's career, each of his publications has found an eager audience, and his reputation as a great man of letters continues to grow.

"Wolfe, Tom" in Current Biography Yearbook (1971) summarizes Wolfe's early life, with particular attention to his stature by 1971. "Wolfe, Thomas Kennerly, Jr.," in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 70, (1999) offers details of Wolfe's life but devotes most of its space to how his writings enhanced his stature in American literature. Barbara Lounsberry, "TomWolfe," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152: American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series (1995) provides a comprehensive overview of Wolfe's life, work, and literary contributions. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (1973) is an anthology of the art form pioneered by Wolfe; it remains a staple in some college journalism classes. Critical studies include Doug Shomette, ed., The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe (1992) and William McKeen, Tom Wolfe (1995), a work in the Twayne United States Authors Series.

Kirk H. Beetz