Most Popular Books by Tom Wolfe

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.

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.

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe''s first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe''s novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author''s reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.

The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. 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.

"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).

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.

Tom Wolfe''s The Purple Decades brings together the author''s own 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.

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.

At Dupont University, an innocent college freshman named Charlotte Simmons learns that her intellect alone will not help her survive.

The strange saga of American architecture in the 20th century makes for both comedy and intellectual excitement as Wolfe debunks the Euro gods of modern and postmodern architecture and their American counterparts.

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.

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe''s The Electric Kool-Aid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism. This is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day. "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 psychedelic 1960s.

The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. "A whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution." (Dwight Garner, New York Times) 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.

This is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous (baton twirling competitions) to the deadly serious (the Vietnam War). The pieces are notable because they do not conform to the standard dispassionate and even-handed model of journalism. Rather they incorporate literary devices usually only found in fictional works.

Men first flew into space in 1961, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of that adventure: namely, the perceptions and goals of the astronauts themselves, aloft and during certain remarkable odysseys on earth.

Originally published: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.

"When are the 1970s going to begin?" ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head-on in these rollicking essays in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine -- and even provided the 1970s with its name: "The Me Decade."

Amerika in den frühen Sechzigerjahren: LSD-Experimente, San Francisco, Blumenkinder. Und eine Busreise, wie es sie nie zuvor gegeben hat und nie mehr geben wird. 1968 beschrieb Tom Wolfe die Reise von Ken Kesey und seinen „Merry Pranksters“ in seinem legendären Klassiker. Ein Buch, welches längst als Neues Testament der Hipster-Mythologie gilt.

Tells the story of the first American astronauts.

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

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.

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.

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.