What Was Radical About Tom Wolfe

Radical Wolfe is a new documentary currently playing in movie theaters based on a 2015 obituary appreciation written by journalist Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair. Directed by Richard Dewey and featuring interviews with Lewis, Historian Niall Ferguson, Writer Christopher Buckley. New Yorker writer Emily Witt, and Esquire Classic editor Alex Belth, agent Lynn Nesbit, and an abundance of photos and great footage from throughout his life, and readings voiced by Jon Hamm.

For those of us who grew up on Wolfe (and those of us who dreamed of being a fraction of the reporter and writer he was), it’s really a pleasure to spend time in his company again and to be reminded of Wolfe’s skill not only at reporting, not only as a writer, but also as the incomparable marketer of his own brand.

There was a time when Tom Wolfe was the most read journalist in America, taking all the techniques of fiction, poetry and spoken word entertainment into reporting first for magazines and then in such books, as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankers, and The Right Stuff, about the astronauts of the Mercury program.

Wolfe coined the term “New Journalism” to group journalists whose accounts infused the personal with the factual, such as Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese.

As a social commentator he liked to fell the largest oak in the forest, as he did with Radical Chic, which satirized Leonard Bernstein’s well-intentioned fundraiser for the Black Panthers at his Park Avenue apartment. Wolfe zeroed in on targets in contemporary culture with his attack on Modern Architecture (From Bauhaus to Our House), Contemporary Art and Art Criticism (The Painted Word), and even human speech and evolution (The Kingdom of Speech).

Wolfe also became the most read novelist in America, infusing fiction with all the techniques of journalism, creating satires of American society with such works as The Bonfire of the Vanities (the income inequalities of the 1980s), A Man in Full (The New South), I am Charlotte Simmons (Women on college campuses) and Back to Blood (immigration).

As we learn from the documentary, Wolfe didn’t mind making enemies (he may have rather liked it), and we see him smiling through a hailstorm of criticism from such luminaries at John F. Kennedy, Hunter Thompson (who was a friend), Normal Mailer, and John Irving among others.

Wolfe had a talent not just for writing but, as mentioned earlier, for marketing himself. Although a privileged white person from Viriginia, Wolfe doubled down on his outsider status – a Southerner at Yale University, he lived in New York City in an Upper East Side townhouse and made his uniform a three-piece white suit, and often dressed in high collared dress shirts and wore a fedora when neither had been in style for decades. It was his willingness to be put himself in the center of scenes in which he was an outsider, whether it was hot rod car racing, or LSD proselytizers in San Francisco, or Jet pilots in Florida, that allowed his work to flourish and thrive.

He is compared to Hunter Thompson and others that Wolfe himself dubbed as “New Journalists” but in terms of his facility, southern charm and sheperd of his slightly naughty idiosyncratic image, I am surprised there was no reference to Truman Capote who was in his own day the progenitor of the non-fiction novel with In Cold Blood.

It is hard to find a present-day equivalent: Michael Lewis certainly has the Southern beginnings and the success in non-fiction, and his work tells us things we didn’t understand in popular culture, but he is neither the searing prose stylist or best-selling novelist, as Wolfe proved himself. But, then again, who is?

What was Radical about Wolfe was, in the end, not so much his opinions, his sparring with others, but his great success.