Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe was an American journalist and novelist whose work in the 1960s helped define New Journalism and whose 1980s and 1990s novels brought a documentary sensibility to long-form American fiction. He was born Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a magazine editor. He earned his bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University in 1951 and his Ph.D. in American studies from Yale in 1957.

He worked as a reporter for the Springfield Union, the Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune, where his 1963 Esquire article "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" — about Southern California car-customizers — became a foundational example of New Journalism, applying the techniques of the realist novel to magazine reportage. His 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicled the cross-country bus journey of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and remains one of the most-cited works of 1960s American counterculture journalism.

His 1979 book The Right Stuff — about the test pilots who became the first Mercury Seven astronauts — won the National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted into the 1983 film of the same name. His 1987 first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, originally serialized in Rolling Stone, sold more than two million copies in hardcover and was adapted as a film by Brian De Palma in 1990.

He continued to write novels — A Man in Full (1998), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Back to Blood (2012) — alongside essay collections including The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). He was known for his white three-piece suits, which he wore as his public uniform from the 1960s onward. He died on May 14, 2018, in Manhattan at age 88.

His name Tom is a short form of Thomas, from the Aramaic T'oma meaning "twin." It has been one of the most-common American boys' names for centuries, and Wolfe carried it through more than five decades of journalism and fiction.