Books

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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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,… 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… 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… 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… 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… More
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Essays

The Origins of Speech

– Harper's Magazine, August 2016.
Excerpt: Nobody in academia had ever witnessed or even heard of a performance like this before. In just a few years, in the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student — a student, in his twenties — had taken over an entire field of study,… More

Eunuchs of the Universe

– Daily Beast, January 4, 2013.
Excerpt: Come join us as we go back seven months to the apex of the history of American capitalism in the 21st century. We find ourselves in a swarm of fellow starstruck souls outside the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, churning, squirming. To… More

Faking West, Going East

– New York Times, April 24, 2010.
In 1871, Mrs. Stowe was living in a mansion in Hartford, when a 36-year-old writer came to town and built a bigger one barely a block away. There, practically next door, he proceeded to overtake and replace her as the most famous American writer of all time.… More

The Rich Have Feelings, Too

– Vanity Fair, September 2009.
Excerpt: Up until the tarantulas arrived late last year waving their billions in “bailout” money before our faces, there were ten of us, including the two Harvard algorithm swamis, who could use the Gulfstream V, the Falcon, and the three Learjets pretty… More

One Giant Leap to Nowhere

– New York Times, July 18, 2009.
Excerpt: WELL, let’s see now … That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA. The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in… More

Greenwich Time

– New York Times, September 27, 2008.
Be aware that your correspondent is merely bringing you the news when he reports how many people have besieged the author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” over the past week with the question, “Where does this leave the Masters of the Universe now?”… More

A City Built of Clay

– New York Magazine, July 6, 2008.
Excerpt: Yet rise and stand he did. He introduced himself. His name was Clay Felker. He had a booming voice, but it wasn’t so much the boom that struck me. It was his honk. The New York Honk, as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American… More

Pell-Mell

– The Atlantic, November 2007.
Excerpt: Since you asked … the American idea was born at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, December 2, 1803, the moment Thomas Jefferson sprang the so-called pell-mell on the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, at dinner in the White House. Oh, this was no… More

The Pirate Pose

– Portfolio, May 2007.
Excerpt: There are some heavy-hitting Medicare-qualified hedge fund managers, notably Carl Icahn, 71, and the home run king, T. Boone Pickens, 78, who made $1.5 billion personally in a single year, 2005. But most of these people are in their late thirties… More
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Multimedia

Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood

– Documentary, 2012.
Summary: Tom Wolfe, legendary author and satirist, spent five years researching his novel, Back to Blood, in Miami. This film follows him through the best and worst of Miami, a sultry, exotic crossroads teeming with immigrant ambition, opulent wealth and… More

Tom Wolfe on Uncommon Knowledge

– Hoover Institution, YouTube, July 23, 2013.
Summary: This week on Uncommon Knowledge author Tom Wolfe discusses the ideas and inspirations for Back to Blood, a story of decadence and the new America. In the book , Wolfe paints a story of a decaying culture enduring constant uncertainty. Heroes are… More

Tom Wolfe, Dinner Keynote, NAS 2013 Conference

– National Association of Scholars, YouTube, May 2, 2013.
Tom Wolfe, author, presents the Dinner Keynote Address at the 2013 NAS Conference. May 2, 2013, Harvard Club, New York City.

Tom Wolfe on Reporting Everything

– Daily Beast, YouTube, January 4, 2013.
Tom Wolfe remembers what bothered him most in his writing on a gang bang from “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
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