The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.

Summary from Publisher: In his first book–a collection that launched its author as America’s foremost entertainer with something to say–Tom Wolfe took a sharp-eyed look at the American scene of the early 1960s and zeroed in on the exotic forms of status-seeking that… More

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1968.

Summary from Publisher: For a start, Kesey’s own life with the Merry Pranksters is perhaps the consummate example of a phenomenon that, in 1968, baffled the national imagination: the transformation of the “promising middle-class youth with all the advantages” into what… More

The Pump House Gang

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.

Summary from Publisher: Running throughout The Pump House Gang is the central theme of most of Tom Wolfe’s writing: Status. Much of the book deals with a surprising phenomenon in contemporary life: a determined retreat from conventional social hierarchies that Tom Wolfe calls… More

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Summary from Publisher: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe’s fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world. In… More

The New Journalism

New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Summary from Publisher: “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… More

The Painted Word

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.

Summary from Publisher: The Painted Word charts the erratic course of the social history of Modern Art from its beginnings in revolution–a revolution against literary content in art–to its present state, in which it has become, quite unconsciously, a parody of itself,… More

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Summary from Publisher: Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine proves again that Wolfe is a brilliant observer of style who is also a master stylist. He shows, also, the range of his gifts–he can write about aerial combat over North Vietnam (“The Truest Sport: Jousting… More

The Right Stuff

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Summary from Publisher: Men first flew into space in 1961, but until The Right Stuff was first published in 1979 few people 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… More

In Our Time

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.

Summary from Publisher: Rumbling through In Our Time like an indoor temblor is the shifting moral terrain of America. Tom Wolfe introduces us to the inhabitants of this cockeyed landscape-The New Cookie, “the girl in her twenties for whom the American male now customarily shucks his… More

From Bauhaus to Our House

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

Summary from Publisher: As Tom Wolfe writes in his introduction to From Bauhaus to Our House,”O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much… More

The Purple Decades

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.

Summary from Publisher: 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… More

The Bonfire of the Vanities

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987.

Summary from Publisher: 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… More

A Man in Full

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Summary from Publisher: The setting is Atlanta, Georgia-a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up… More

Hooking Up

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Summary from Publisher: 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… More

I Am Charlotte Simmons

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2004.

Summary from Publisher: 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… More

Back to Blood

New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

Summary from Publisher: 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 our hero, officer Nestor Camacho, on board–Tom Wolfe is off and running headlong into… More

The Kingdom of Speech

New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2016.

Summary from the publisher: 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… More