Essays on Tom Wolfe

October 3, 1900, Asheville, North Carolina, United States

September 15, 1938, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Author

Fiction, Drama

• Look Homeward, Angel
• Of Time and the River
• You Can't Go Home Again
• The Web and the Rock

• "There is no sight on earth more appealing than the sight of a woman making dinner for someone she loves."
• "Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs."
• "Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man."

March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018

Thom Wolfe was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.

Wolfe was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia. After studying at Washington and Lee University (B.A., 1951), he then attended Yale University (Ph.D., 1957) and subsequently wrote for several newspapers, including the Springfield Union in Massachusetts and The Washington Post. In the early 1960s he moved to New York City and soon was contributing to various publications, notably the magazines New York, Esquire, and Harper’s. Around this time Wolfe adopted his trademark attire: a three-piece white suit and a high-collared silk shirt.

“A Man in Full”, “Back to Blood”, “From Bauhaus to Our House”, “Hooking Up”, “I Am Charlotte Simmons”, “My Three Stooges”, “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”, “The Kingdom of Speech”, “The Painted Word”, “The Right Stuff”

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. Much of Wolfe's later work addresses neuroscience.

Wolfe died from an infection in Manhattan on May 14, 2018, at the age of 88. He is remembered as a leading critic of contemporary life and a proponent of New Journalism (the application of fiction-writing techniques to journalism).

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”
“I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”
“There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.”