Tom Wolfe, 1931–2018
Tom Wolfe died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Between 1965 and 1981, the dapper white-suited father of New Journalism chronicled, in pyrotechnic prose, everything from Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters to the first American astronauts. And then, having revolutionized journalism with his kaleidoscopic yet rigorous reportage, he decided it was time to write novels. As he said in his Art of Fiction interview, “Practically everyone my age who wanted to write somehow got the impression in college that there was only one thing to write, which was a novel and that if you went into journalism, this was only a cup of coffee on the road to the final triumph. At some point you would move into a shack—it was always a shack for some reason—and write a novel. This would be your real métier.” With Wolfe wrote a sprawling, quintessential magnum opus of New York in the eighties. His first two novels were runaway best sellers, and his success won him the. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers—he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.” Although Wolfe’s later two novels, and , won him more accolades from than anything else, his cutting portrayals of America earned him a lasting and well-deserved place in literature. In his 1975 book of art criticism, Wolfe describes the “Art Mating Ritual” in a way that still feels perfectly current: the artist must perform what Wolfe dubs the “BoHo Dance.” She must move to Lower Manhattan and perform her bohemian disdain of wealth. In short, she must get close enough to the people uptown—“the Museum of Modern Art, certain painters, certain collectors”—to spit on them. When George Plimpton sat down with Wolfe for his Art of Fiction interview in 1994, at Wolfe’s favorite Italian restaurant, Isle of Capri on the Upper East Side (still open—and still relatively highly reviewed on Yelp), “the author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: ‘Shows that I’m versatile.’ ” Although Wolfe’s wide-ranging interests and stylistic leaps were indeed versatile, he did have a singular focus: our hypocrisy, our greed, and our status-obsessed culture. His is an incisive voice we would have been grateful for in 2018 and beyond. Below, read some of our favorite moments from his interview, which subscribers . —Nadja Spiegelman
