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RIP Tom Wolfe

Started by PIE-GUY, May 15, 2018, 11:11:16 AM

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PIE-GUY

That's a tough one. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is still one of the best books I have ever read.

https://nyti.ms/2IidgPI

QuoteTom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic Nonfiction Writer and Novelist, Dies at 87

By Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes|May. 15th, 2018

May 15, 2018

Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattans moneyed status-seekers in works like "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities," died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.

But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still-boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, "Neo-pretentious."

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like "Radical Chic" and "the Me Decade" — became American idioms.

His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

"As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world," Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. "His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word 'hernia' fifty-seven times."

William F. Buckley, Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: "He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else."

From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, "still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the sixties hipster subculture," the press critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book's 40th anniversary.

Even more impressive, to many critics, was "The Right Stuff," his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language.

At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper's and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen was that journalism and non-fiction had "wiped out the novel as American literature's main event."

After "The Right Stuff," published in 1979, he confronted what he called "the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding ten or fifteen years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?"

The answer came with "The Bonfire of the Vanities." The novel, which initially ran as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and was published in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.

A full obituary will appear shortly.



I've been coming to where I am from the get go
Find that I can groove with the beat when I let go
So put your worries on hold
Get up and groove with the rhythm in your soul

sls.stormyrider

not to mention the Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities

RIP
"toss away stuff you don't need in the end
but keep what's important, and know who's your friend"
"It's a 106 miles to Chicago. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."

mopper_smurf

Here Comes The Flood - a weblog about music
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As a roadie for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, I learned that I should give up being a guitar player. - Lemmy

mistercharlie

Damn, Electric Kool-Aid changed my life. Plus Bonfire and The Right Stuff were amazing as well.

RIP
"I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was and now what I'm with isn't 'it' and what's 'it' seems weird and scary to me"
Quote from: kellerb on August 02, 2009, 02:29:05 AM
You haven't lived until you've had a robot shart in your ear and followed along in the live setlist thread while it happens. 

kellerb

Did more than any other human being to help everyone detect undercover cops by their shoes.

Also wrote other stuff.

RIP

ytowndan

Damn...

I just dug out my dusty paperback of Electric Kool-Aid, which I'll dig into tonight.  But I don't have a copy of the Bonfire of the Vanities here.  I'll have to change that. 
Quote from: nab on July 27, 2007, 12:20:24 AM
You never drink alone when you have something good to listen to.