Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (Richmond, Virginia, 1930 - Manhattan, 2018) was an American author and journalist and one of the central figures of New Journalism. His career moved from the pop culture reporting of the 1960s to the social satire of the decades that followed, and late in life to the novel. He is remembered for showing that reportage could borrow the techniques of fiction without giving up factual accuracy.

The son of a garden designer and an agronomist, he studied at Washington and Lee University after turning down an offer from Princeton. He tried his hand at professional baseball before giving it up. He then earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale, though his dissertation was first rejected until he rewrote it in a more objective tone. He chose journalism over academic life and worked for The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune.

In 1963 Esquire published his piece on the hot rod culture of southern California. It grew out of a letter he sent to his editor, written without the usual conventions of reporting, and the magazine printed it more or less as it was. Wolfe advocated building scenes step by step, using plenty of dialogue, shifting points of view and describing the status symbols people choose. He also championed what he called saturation reporting, which means staying with one's subjects for long stretches of time.

He admired Balzac, and he cited Dickens, Zola and Steinbeck as models. His early books were essays of cultural criticism. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, appeared in 1987 and portrayed New York society through sex, race, money and ideology. His work changed over time, moving from a defense of pop culture in the sixties to attacks on the narcissism of the eighties, on liberal politics and on intellectual orthodoxy about architecture and modern art.

His legacy lies in showing that reportage could be read as literature and in influencing several generations of writers. He received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1980 and the National Humanities Medal in 2001. Wolfe described himself as an atheist and, in 2007, said he had voted for George W. Bush's reelection in 2004. He was known for wearing white suits in public appearances.