Tom Wolfe, the influential writer whose unconventional, exuberant prose laid the foundation for so-called New Journalism and fueled his best-sellers The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, has died. He was 88.
Lynn Nesbit, Wolfe’s agent, told the Associated Press that Wolfe died of an infection Monday in a hospital in Manhattan.
Wolfe’s most famous works include the landmark 1968 nonfiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which chronicles the LSD-enhanced odyssey that author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took aboard the wildly colored school bus named Further — a journey that began at Kesey’s log house in La Honda in San Mateo County.
Among Wolfe’s later books are the meaty, 700-page-plus novels A Man in Full (1998), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) and Back to Blood (2012).
Both The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and The Right Stuff (1979), a National Book Award winner, were adapted into movies. The former, a hugely successful novel that offered a sweeping, satirical take on New York City in the go-go 1980s, was a flop at the box office; the latter, about the pilots who became NASA astronauts, earned eight Academy Award nominations.
A semi-professional baseball pitcher who tried out with the New York Giants, Wolfe started his writing career as a reporter for the Springfield Union in Massachusetts and then the Washington Post, serving as its Latin America correspondent.
In 1962, he landed a job as a general assignment reporter and features writer at the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune and at New York magazine (at the time the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement). There, he honed the writing style that would come to be known as New Journalism. The genre, which Wolfe championed in the 1973 anthology The New Journalism, emphasized a subjective, less impersonal and more free-flowing style of writing. Others who contributed to that collection included Truman Capote, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson.
