The NYT obituary, "Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic Nonfiction Writer and Novelist, Dies at 87":
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattans moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 87....I don't think there has been a more important writer in our lifetime. So brilliant. So many ideas about new ways to write. I'm going to click on my Tom Wolfe tag to see what I've said about him. I feel really sad to lose him. I knew he was pretty old and would have to go sometime, but it surprised me to see the news just now. Such a loss!
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism....
From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the sixties hipster subculture,” the press critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.
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213 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 213 of 213Our overload society has been fed much too much fiction: we are fat with fiction, morbidly obese with too many books, too many movies, too many TV shows, too many stories. Fiction is wallpaper, around us always. There is so much fiction we have no room for history: there is so much fiction we have no need for history.
There is so much fiction that we no longer have to actually read it, we glean it in our gills from conversations and catch-phrases, from reviews and remakes and reticulation: osmosis, plankton, dandelion fluff.
Things Shakespeare never wrote, Part One:
A good car chase scene.
-LWL
From the fmr he took a jaundiced view of out cross straits civil war, some idiosyncrasies like the botanicals and aspects of Haitian culture, from the latter an examinatiob of the war against crime and the cultures which halper it, also the extravagance of the art world is,in sharp relief.
rhhardin: Sometimes, ignorance is something to e proud of. This is not one of them.
"Be" Dammit. "Be."
rhhardin said...
I must have missed it. I was doing math at the time.
I was very disappointed to click on this comment thread, only to see it polluted by numerous trolling comments from rhhardin, who doesn't know who Tom Wolfe is, and thinks that the fact he doesn't know is somehow significant and interesting to others.
If you've got nothing to say, rhhardin, piss off and don't be a troll.
”Sure, Cookie. That's why "Death Wish " was so popular.”
Dinkins was mayor long after the DEATH WISH movies.
Yes there was a problem there, the big Apple hadn't fully degenerAted as it did in the Dinkins era....NYC started its climb up from the depths, and crime rates started dropping, during Dinkins' term.
Even if crime did drop during Dinkins' term he probably had nothing to do with it. Legal abortions did...
Abortions and Crime
...or so says one theory. It's a compelling theory for many reasons including it helps to answer why crime also dropped dramatically in places that did not implement any additional crime prevention initiatives.
THE LAST AMERICAN HERO
by Tom Wolfe
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/twolfe.html
@rehajm:
Read up on it...Dinkins initiated programs that are credited with helping reduce the crime rate. That said, it can't all have been him, as crime stats started dropping nationwide around the same time, and remain very low today, compared to the era just before.
But, if Dinkins had nothing to do with it--it was entirely an accident of social trends--then all of Rudy Giuliani's boasts and claims that he cleaned up NYC's crime crisis are also bullshit. I never liked the asshole, but I will grant that policies he initiated probably helped continue trends that had begun several years before he took office.
In short, both Dinkins and Giuliani were helped along by factors outside their ken or control.
I worked in social services and lobbying and came into frequent contact with city officials and socialite donors in Atlanta in the 80's and 90's. A Man in Full is kodak-color accurate except that it was too kind by half. The description of the absurdly garish City Hall is worth the price of the book. Also the hydraulic aerobicized second wives.
It was weird to watch the city's elite proudly welcome Wolfe when he came through to gather material for the book. There was a great deal of excitement and dinners held in his honor, but he was doubtlessly going to tell the truth, which would doubtlessly not look good for anyone involved in government or the Chamber crowd. Yet they still managed to be surprised when the book was published. It was as if nobody had read him. Atlanta's bizarre boosterism blinded the white and black upper classes alike.
I've had male students who were disinterested in pretty much everything except the Wolfe essays on computers and cars. There's little else to pick from in modern literary writing that doesn't subtly put down men who invent things and take risks.
I lived in Manhattan during the Taxi Driver/Death Wish era and left pre-Dinkins; but I stay in touch with those I left behind. A married couple I know are big fans of Giuliani because of the clean-up and were enjoying NYC during his administration. However, when Bloomberg was mayor they sadly reported the return of the bums and an upsurge of crime; and that under Comrade De Blasio, things have devolved so much, it's like the Giuliani Era never happened. They moved to New Jersey; but it sounds like a golden opportunity for Comrade Cookie to experience the "glories" of the Dinkins era.
No wonder he never got the Nobel prize: Tom Wolfe made the left look stupid
Tina Trent: "Atlanta's bizarre boosterism." Amen to that. They even doctor the weather reports to make the weather seem better than it is. In late Fall and in Winter, it's always "colder than average;" in late Spring and in summer, it's always "hotter than average." Makes me long for whenever this mythical Golden Age of "average" Atlanta weather was.
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