Tom Wolfe loved American culture for all its excess. Groupies, doormen, hippies, astronauts, bankers and frat boys took on a magisterial presence in his writing, and if there was a hint of hypocrisy in their actions, then all the better.
Wolfe reveled in worlds where people stood tall and acted with extravagance and swagger. He often joined the parade himself, author-turned-celebrity in his cream-colored suit, walking stick in hand.
Fervent disciple _ if not the high priest _ of New Journalism, he brought to his stories techniques often reserved for fiction and dispensed candid and often droll commentary on the obsessions and passing trends of American society. The author of 15 books, fiction and nonfiction, Wolfe is credited with such phrases as "radical chic," "the me-decade" and "the right stuff."
Kurt Vonnegut considered him a genius. Mary Gordon called him a thinking man's redneck. Surfers in La Jolla labeled him a dork after he profiled them. The novelist John Gregory Dunne observed that his writings have the capacity "to drive otherwise sane and sensible people clear around the bend."
Once asked why critics despised him, Wolfe said, "Intellectuals aren't used to being written about. When they aren't taken seriously and become part of the human comedy, they have a tendency to squeal like weenies over an open fire."
One of the most conspicuous voices in American letters, Wolfe died Monday at a Manhattan hospital, according to his agent, Lynn Nesbit. He was 87. He had been hospitalized with an infection, according to the Guardian.
"Tom was a singular talent," said his friend Gay Talese. "He was an extraordinarily active reporter whose unique prose was supported on a foundation of solid research."
Often considered a satirist for his broadly drawn portraits, Wolfe saw himself as a realist and supported the claim with his reporting. "Every kind of writer," he once proclaimed, "should get away from the desk and see things they don't know about."
"Tom had an extraordinarily sharp eye and a commitment to tell the truth," said Jann Wenner, friend and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine. "He didn't write out of malice. He went to the essence of the matter and called it like he saw it."
His pen may have been caustic, but Wolfe in person was unfailingly courteous, according to Pat Strachan, senior editor at Little, Brown who worked with him since the late 1970s.
"His publishers and their staffs know that he was an exceptionally good-natured, considerate, and generous man _ a kind and brilliant man," Strachan said.
Wolfe got his start in 1963 with a story that he almost couldn't write. He had gone to California to report on renegade car designers working out of garages in Burbank and Lynwood. After racking up a $750 tab at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he returned to New York and stared at his typewriter, unable to find the right words.
As the deadline neared, he typed up his notes for his editor who planned to reassign the story to another writer. Ten hours and 49 pages later, Wolfe had "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."
In 1965, the story became a centerpiece for a collection of essays that established his national reputation as a writer who didn't use the English language so much as he detonated it. Allusions, dramatic asides, neologisms and flamboyant punctuation became the hallmarks of his style.
Surfers, sitting on the edge of the break, were like "Phrygian sacristans."
Chuck Yeager, punching through the sound barrier above the Mojave, saw the sky turn "deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out _ and the sun shone at the same time."
A speedboat, racing across Miami's Biscayne Bay, slams against the waves, "throttle wide open forty-five miles an hour against the wind SMACK bouncing bouncing its shallow aluminum hull SMACK from swell SMACK to swell SMACK."
"What Tom did with words is what French Impressionists did with color," said Larry Dietz, editor and friend.
A disciplined writer, Wolfe held himself to a quota of 10 triple-spaced pages a day, but writing was never fun for Wolfe. "It's the hardest work in the world," he said. "The only thing that will get you through it is maybe someone will applaud when it's over."
