Best Selling Books by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series. From "America''s nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. " Millions of words have poured forth about man''s trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.

One of the most celebrated bestsellers of the decade, here is Wolfe''s wise and wickedly brilliant novel of lust, greed, Wall Street and the American way of life in the ''80s.

"America''s nerviest journalist" (Newsweek) trains his satirical eye on Modern Art in this "masterpiece" (The Washington Post) Wolfe''s style has never been more dazzling, his wit never more keen. He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. The Painted Word is Tom Wolfe "at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Tom Wolfe''s THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES defined an era and established Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. In his #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist, A MAN IN FULL, the setting shifts to Atlanta, Georgia—a racially mixed late-century boomtown teeming with fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians." Don’t miss the star-studded mini series adaptation of A Man in Full–coming soon to Netflix. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta''s grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood''s daughter, the city''s delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the Year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today''s girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is being introduced by name. And how rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!-as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls'' File-o-Fax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up''s displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers... to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new field of genetics and neuroscience. . . to the inner workings of television''s magazine-show sting operations. Printed here in its entirety is "Ambush at Fort Bragg," a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, "U. R. Here," the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe''s forecast ("My Three Stooges," "The Invisible Artist") of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America. As an espresso after so much full-bodied twenty-first-century fare, we get a trip to Memory Mall. Reprinted here for the first time are Wolfe''s two articles about The New Yorker magazine and its editor, William Shawn, which ignited one of the great firestorms of twentieth-century journalism. Wolfe''s afterword about it all is in itself a delicious draught of an intoxicating era, the Twistin'' Sixties. In sum, here is Tom Wolfe at the height of his powers as reporter, novelist, sociologist, memoirist, and-to paraphrase what Balzac called himself-the very secretary of American society in the 21st century.

RADICAL CHIC is Tom Wolfe''s hilarious dissection of the need among wealthy liberals in late ''60s America to be seen to support the correct political causes - even if that meant giving champagne receptions for the feared Black Panther Party. MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS takes a satirical look at how, during that period of cultural upheaval, minority groups from the ghettoes refined the art of intimidating the white bureaucracy. In these essays, Wolfe''s supercharged yet consummately controlled prose transports the reader back to the heady days of hippie revolution and Black Power. THE PAINTED WORD is Wolfe''s insightful, flamboyant and supremely readable survey of Modern Art. Taking in Picasso, Pollock and Warhol, he describes the tense relationship between bohemian artists and their wealthy patrons, and concludes that modern art is Theory - the paintings and sculptures themselves are mere illustrations of the text. ''Tome Wolfe is a journalist who always manages to combine an encylopedic store of inside knowledge with the obstinate detachment of a visitor from Mars, not ot mention a brilliant style and incisive wit'' San Francisco Chronicle

The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech -- not evolution -- is responsible for humanity''s complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism The phrase ''radical chic'' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program''s money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities.

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelist When Tom Wolfe smashed his way onto the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his next project, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The result is The Pump House Gang (published simultaneously with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968): a collection of essays that chronicles life at the end of the 1960s, written with all the panache and perceptiveness that made Wolfe one of our greatest American journalists. Running throughout The Pump House Gang is a central theme of Wolfe’s writing: status. In pieces about Hugh Hefner, Natalie Wood, and a gang of affluent teenage surfers, among others, Wolfe discusses the 1960s phenomenon of retreating from conventional social hierarchies, which he calls “starting your own league.” Dancers, motorcyclists, lumpen-dandies, and stay-at-homes—everybody’s doing it. Except for die-hards in the crumbling old social worlds of New York and London, where the confusion is so great that nobody can tell whether this is really the path to the top they’ve taken or just the service elevator. Dazzlingly brilliant as a stylist, daringly provocative as a commentator, and always entertaining, in The Pump House Gang, Wolfe is thoroughly, completely himself.

The essential collection of Tom Wolfe’s writing on a turning-point era in modern American culture. The Purple Decades brings together the author''s selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play. It was in the 1960s and 1970s—those “purple decades”—that Tom Wolfe rose to fame as one of the late-twentieth-century pioneers of American literature. He became the foremost chronicler of the gaudiest period in American history, much of which is spread out before us in these selections from nine of his books. Wolfe’s innovations in style, his feats as a reporter, and his insights into modern American life dominated a period of widespread experimentation in the writing of nonfiction. Wolfe’s contributions to the language of the purple decades range from the phrases “the right stuff” to “radical chic,” the latter of which he coined in 1970, when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers in his apartment on Park Avenue; and on to “the Me Decade,” as the 1970s were dubbed as soon as Wolfe’s essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” appeared in 1976. The complete texts of “The Last American Hero” and “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” and long sections of “Radical Chic” and The Right Stuff, are included here in The Purple Decades. Generous selections from both From Bauhaus to Our House and The Painted Word also appear here, as well as many stories from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, and Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. When Tom Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965, Newsweek predicted: “This will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.” In these pages the falcon flies with big talons, and an even bigger grin, across the first two decades of Tom Wolfe’s literary career.

After critiquing―and infuriating―the art world with The Painted Word, the award-winning author Tom Wolfe shares his less-than-favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth-century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass-and-steel-box buildings that have influenced (and infected) America’s cities.

A collection of impeccably observed stories, sketches, and essays in full, exuberant, classic Wolfe mode. The third installment in Wolfe’s trilogy of essay-length works after The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is wide-ranging, irreverent, colorful, and gimlet-eyed. Originally published in 1976, these stories capture the full spectrum of the ’70s (“the Me Decade,” in Wolfe’s memorable words), from the hilarious to the hard-hitting. Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is classic Wolfe.

Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast, In Our Time exemplifies Tom Wolfe’s writing on 1970s America. In Our Time is a biting collection of Tom Wolfe’s essays and illustrations cataloging and critiquing the state of 1970s American society. In this slim but unsparing collection of razor-sharp observations and mordant caricatures, Wolfe reaffirms his role as the great chronicler, debunker, and exuberant plain speaker of American letters. Wolfe’s joyriding satirical tour through the emerging American archetypes of the 1970s is an essential portrait of the delirious, madding decade.

Tom Wolfe''s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism, "An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the 1960s.

Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America''s youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont''s privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont''s godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university''s "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ''00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America''s master chronicler.

"An excellent book by a genius," said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of new journalism. "This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other."--Newsweek In his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) Wolfe introduces us to the sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

''The hell with it . . . let chaos reign . . . louder music, more wine . . . All the old traditions are exhausted and no new one is yet established. All bets are off! The odds are cancelled! It''s anybody''s ballgame . . . '' Tom Wolfe introduces and exults in his generation''s journalistic talent: Truman Capote inside the mind of a psychotic killer Hunter S. Thompson skunk drunk at the Kentucky Derby Michael Herr dispatching reality from the Vietnam killing fields Rex Reed giving the star treatment to the ageing Ava Gardner As well as Norman Mailer Joe Eszterhas Terry Southern Nicholas Tomalin George Plimpton James Mills Gay Talese Joan Didion and many other legends of tape and typewriter telling it like it is from Warhol''s Factory to the White House lawn, from the saddle of a Harley to the toughest football team in the US.

A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. As a police launch speeds across Miami''s Biscayne Bay -- with officer Nestor Camacho on board -- Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, a wanna-go-muckraking young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; an Anglo sex-addiction psychiatrist and his Latina nurse by day, loin lock by night-until lately, the love of Nestor''s life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin'' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the ''hoods, "de-skilled" conceptual artists at the Miami Art Basel Fair, "spectators" at the annual Biscayne Bay regatta looking only for that night''s orgy, yenta-heavy ex-New Yorkers at an "Active Adult" condo, and a nest of shady Russians. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe''s previous bestselling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

Once you decide what kind of spirits are living in your bottles, Tom Wolfe will set you to work carving charming faces to match, using small pieces of scrap wood, basic carving tools and paint, and not much time. The finished carvings could be hung around a bottle, a neck, on a Christmas tree, or anywhere else that could use a little personality! More than 200 color photos paired with step-by-step instructions, plus a full-color gallery of 20 different carved bottle spirits.

A roughout is the start of a carving that skips the first few steps to take you right into the good part. In his friendly, laid-back way, Tom Wolfe guides you step-by-step through the carving of an unlucky fisherman from his own roughout design. The emphasis here is on staying loose with the carving and seeing the endless possibilities you have in carving anything from the most basic shapes to the smallest details.

Sherman MacCoy, fleuron de la jeune aristocratie des boursiers de Wall Street, vit très luxueusement sur Park Avenue. Mais, un soir, tout bascule : perdu dans le Bronx avec sa maîtresse, il renverse un jeune Noir et prend la fuite. Une des plus cyniques et des plus justes présentations de New York.

Con su característica atención al detalle, Tom Wolfe aplica su observación personal de universidades en los Estados Unidos a la historia de Charlotte Simmons - una estudiante ingenua en su primer año de estudio. Aunque al principio, la Universidad de Dupo

Tells the story of the first American astronauts.