Tom Wolfe, Pioneer of New Journalism and Chronicler of American Indulgence, Is Dead at 87

Tom Wolfe, who pioneered a voice-driven, wildly vivid style of creative nonfiction writing known as New Journalism, has died. He was 87. His literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, told the New York Times that Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. Over the course of his writing life, which began in the 1960s, Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books, many of them classics in the creative nonfiction genre, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as four novels, including Bonfire of the Vanities, and numerous collections of notable articles and essays. "Every kind of writer," he once stated, "should get away from the desk and see things they don't know about."

Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1931, and attended Washington and Lee University. He studied English and began writing in college, but was also a star baseball player, eventually trying out for the New York Giants after graduation, though he did not make the team. Wolfe attended the doctoral program in American studies at Yale University, where he wrote a thesis about American writers.

In 1962, Wolfe moved to New York City, where he began a career as a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune. In 1963, Esquire published an article on hot-rod car culture in Southern California called "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" that quickly established Wolfe's colorful, first-person-inflected reportage style, which created vivid characters and mimicked their speech. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Wolfe's writing (along with contemporaries like Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion) in publications like New York magazine and Harper's continued to define New Journalism. In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut reviewed Wolfe's first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and called it an "excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention." In 1968, Wolfe published *The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test *, an account of his travels in California with LSD proselytizers Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, which remains one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed explorations of American counterculture for which Wolfe became famous. In 1970, Wolfe called his technique as "saturation reporting," and described it this way: "To pull it off, you casually have to stay with the people you are writing about for long stretches...long enough so that you are actually there when revealing scenes take place in their lives."

Wolfe turned to fiction for the first time in 1987, with his bestselling satirical novel Bonfire of the Vanities, which skewered greed and social climbing among the New York establishment in the decadent 1980s. He had previously coined wry, idiomatic terms for describing the pseudo-spiritual self-indulgence of the '70s, including “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade." But Wolfe was also known for his own flamboyant and affected personal style, which included wearing a custom, three piece all-white suit and hat. "Brand names, tastes in clothes and furniture, manners, the way people treat children, servants, or their superiors, are important clues to an individual’s expectations," he told George Plimpton for a 1991 interview with the Paris Review. He also told Plimpton that he read furniture auction catalogues so as to be able to identify how his subjects lived. "When I wrote Radical Chic, as a matter of fact, about a party for the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, I noticed that the platters upon which the Panthers were being served Roquefort cheese balls were gadrooned," he said. "They had this little sort of ribbing around the edges of the trays. You may think that’s a small point, but I think that small points like that can really make a piece, particularly at the beginning. There’s something about a gadrooned platter being served to the Black Panthers that really gives a piece a bite, particularly at the beginning. It doesn’t matter if your audience doesn’t know what a gadrooned platter is. Often people are flattered to have an unusual word thrust upon them. They say, Well, that author thinks I know what he’s talking about!"

Wolfe lived in New York City with his wife Sheila, the art director at Harper's Magazine. He also leaves behind two children, Alexandra, who is also a journalist, and Tommy, his son. In 2010. Wolfe was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.