In a career that lasted more than half a century, Tom Wolfe wrote fiction and nonfiction best-sellers includingThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid TestandThe Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, he created a new type of journalism and coined phrases that became part of the American vocabulary.
Wolfe began working as a newspaper reporter, first forThe Washington Post, then theNew York Herald Tribune. He developed a literary style in nonfiction that became known as the "New Journalism." "I've always agreed on a theoretical level that the techniques for fiction and nonfiction are interchangeable," he said. "The things that work in nonfiction would work in fiction, and vice versa."
"When Tom Wolfe's voice broke into the world of nonfiction, it was a time when a lot of writers, and a lot of artists in general, were turning inwards," says Lev Grossman, book critic forTimemagazine. "Wolfe didn't do that. Wolfe turned outwards. He was a guy who was interested in other people." Wolfe was interested in how they thought, how they did things and how the things they did affected the world around them.
In 1979, Wolfe publishedThe Right Stuff, an account of the military test pilots who became America's first astronauts. Four years later, the book was adapted as a feature film. "The Right Stuffwas the book for me," says Grossman. "It reminded me, in case I'd forgotten, that the world is an incredible place."
InThe Right Stuff, Wolfe popularized the phrase "pushing the envelope." In a New York magazine article, Wolfe described the 1970s as "The 'Me' Decade." Grossman says these phrases became part of the American idiom because they were accurate.
"He was an enormously forceful observer, and he was not afraid of making strong claims about what was happening in reality," Grossman says. "He did it well and people heard him. And they repeated what he said because he was right." All those words started a revolution in nonfiction that is still going on.
