The walls around us support shelf after shelf of books on Flemish masters and folios of modern painters, along with portraits of Wolfe’s daughter in full equestrian gear. On the table before him stands a small statuette of Chairman Mao. Sitting cross-legged on a plush gold couch in the library of his Upper East Side apartment, wearing the trademark white suit, navy tie, and spotless two-tone spats, Tom Wolfe is about as far from a college keg party as one can be in the United States. I spoke to him upon the publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons, which deals with the sexualized world of university life in America. Wolfe has since published three more novels-A Man in Full (1998), I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Back to Blood (2012). Wolfe accepted and began publishing monthly installments of w hat would become The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a runa w ay bestseller and a potent skewering of the haves and have-nots of the eighties Wall Street boom. In the mid- eighties, he responded to an o f f e r by Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, to serialize a novel he had been meaning to write. The Blac k Panthers, astr onauts, moder n art, and American stock-car racing are among just a few of the things he has written a bout. Wolfe’s interests in Americana were as vast as they were unexpected. The result was “There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kand y Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) t a n geri n e-fla k e d streamline ba by (RAHGHHHH!) around the bend (BR UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM ), ” the cor ner stone piece for his first book of essays. He struggled so much to write it straight that he wrote his editor a long letter about what he couldn’t writ e. During the 1962 newspaper strike, he asked Esquire if he could cover a hot-rod convention in Southern California. Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1931, Wolfe began his career as an old-style journalist, banging out stories for the Springfield Union in western Massachusetts, and later for The Washington Post and the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune. Thompson, Tom Wolfe was one of the early proponents of New Journalism. Along with Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S.
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