48 Facts About Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe grew up on Gloucester Road in the Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park.

Tom Wolfe recounted childhood memories in a foreword to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood.

Tom Wolfe was student council president, editor of the school newspaper, and a star baseball player at St Christopher's School, an Episcopal all-boys school in Richmond.

At Washington and Lee, Tom Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity.

Tom Wolfe majored in English, was sports editor of the college newspaper, and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah, giving him opportunities to practice his writing both inside and outside the classroom.

Tom Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed his professor Fishwick's example, enrolling in Yale University's American studies doctoral program.

In 1956, while still preparing his thesis, Tom Wolfe became a reporter for the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Tom Wolfe has said that part of the reason he was hired by the Post was his lack of interest in politics.

In 1962, Tom Wolfe left Washington DC for New York City, taking a position with the New York Herald Tribune as a general assignment reporter and feature writer.

Tom Wolfe attracted attention in 1963 when, three months before the JFK assassination, he published an article on George Ohsawa and the sanpaku condition foretelling death.

Tom Wolfe struggled with the article until his editor, Byron Dobell, suggested that Wolfe send him his notes so they could piece the story together.

Tom Wolfe experimented with four literary devices not normally associated with feature writing: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed description of individuals' status-life symbols in writing this stylized form of journalism.

Tom Wolfe later referred to this style as literary journalism.

Tom Wolfe championed what he called "saturation reporting," a reportorial approach in which the journalist "shadows" and observes the subject over an extended period of time.

In 1965, Tom Wolfe published a collection of his articles in this style, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, adding to his notability.

Tom Wolfe published a second collection of articles, The Pump House Gang, in 1968.

Tom Wolfe wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics, and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s had been transformed by post-WWII economic prosperity.

Tom Wolfe's defining work from this era is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which for many epitomized the 1960s.

In 1979, Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts.

Tom Wolfe wrote two critiques of and social histories of modern art and modern architecture, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, published in 1975 and 1981, respectively.

In 2016, Tom Wolfe published The Kingdom of Speech, a critique of the work of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.

Tom Wolfe synthesized what he construed as the views of Alfred Russel Wallace and Chomsky on the language organ as not being a product of natural selection to suggest that speech is an invention that is responsible for establishing our humanity.

Tom Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of the homicide squad in The Bronx.

Later Tom Wolfe was unhappy with his "very public first draft" and thoroughly revised his work, even changing his protagonist, Sherman McCoy.

Tom Wolfe had originally made him a writer, but recast him as a bond salesman.

Tom 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 very literary establishment on which Tom Wolfe had long heaped scorn.

Tom Wolfe published his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, chronicling the decline of a poor, bright scholarship student from Alleghany County, North Carolina, after attending an elite university.

Tom Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, and John Steinbeck.

Tom Wolfe announced in early 2008 that he was leaving his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Novelist Louis Auchincloss praised Tom Wolfe, describing The Bonfire of the Vanities as "a marvelous book".

In 2000, Tom Wolfe was criticised by Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, after they were asked if they believed that his books were deserving of their critical acclaim.

Tom Wolfe's writing throughout his career showed an interest in social status competition.

Tom Wolfe describes the characters' thought and emotional processes, such as fear, humiliation and lust, in the clinical terminology of brain chemistry.

Tom Wolfe adopted wearing a white suit as a trademark in 1962.

Tom Wolfe bought his first white suit, planning to wear it in the summer, in the style of Southern gentlemen.

Tom Wolfe found that the suit he had bought was too heavy for summer use, so he wore it in winter, which created a sensation.

Tom Wolfe sometimes accompanied it with a white tie, white homburg hat, and two-tone spectator shoes.

In 1989, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper's Magazine, titled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast".

Tom Wolfe noted a story about him in his Wikipedia bio article at the time which he said had never happened.

Tom Wolfe has been labeled a conservative by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, National Review, and USA Today.

Bush reciprocated the admiration, and is said to have read all of Tom Wolfe's books, according to friends in 2005.

Tom Wolfe supported the US invasion of Afghanistan, but opposed the Iraq War.

Tom Wolfe was an atheist but said that "I hate people who go around saying they're atheists".

Tom Wolfe lived in New York City with his wife Sheila, who designed covers for Harper's Magazine.

Tom Wolfe died from an infection in Manhattan on May 14,2018, at the age of 88.

Tom Wolfe was at times incorrectly credited with coining the term "trophy wife".

Tom Wolfe is the subject of the 2023 documentary film Radical Tom Wolfe.