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
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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… More
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… More