Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 - May 14, 2018) is an American writer and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, the style of news and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporates literary techniques.
Wolfe began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national excellence in the 1960s after the publication of bestselling books such as Kool-Aid Electric Test (a very experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & amp; Mau-Mauing Flak Catchers and The Kandy Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . In 1979, he published The Right Stuff's influential book about the Mercury Seven astronaut, made into a 1983 film of the same title directed by Philip Kaufman.
His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and also became a commercial success. It was adapted as the main film of the same name directed by Brian De Palma.
Video Tom Wolfe
Early life and education
Wolfe was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr., an agronomist and editor of The Southern Planter.
He grew up on Gloucester Road in the Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park. He recounts childhood memories in the preface to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood. He is the head of OSIS, the editor of the school newspaper, and the star baseball player in St. Louis. Christopher's School, the all-boys Episcopal school in Richmond.
After graduating in 1947, he refused admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University. In Washington and Lee, Wolfe is a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He majored in English, was a college newspaper sports editor, and helped find literary magazines, Shenandoah, giving him the opportunity to practice writing both inside and outside the classroom. Her special influence was her teacher Marshall Fishwick, an American study teacher educated at UvA and Yale. More in an anthropological tradition than a literary scholarship, Fishwick teaches his students to see the whole culture, including elements that are considered profane. Wolfe's thesis, entitled "The Zebra Zoo: Anti-Intellectual in America," shows her fondness for words and aspirations against cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951.
While still in college, Wolfe continued playing baseball as a pitcher and started playing semi-professional. In 1952, he gained experiments with the New York Giants but was cut after three days, which he blamed on his inability to throw a good fastballs. Wolfe left baseball and followed his example professor Fishwick to enroll in the Yale University doctoral program in America. Ph.D. thesis titled American Writers League: The Activity of Communist Organizations Among American Authors, 1929-1942. In his research trip, Wolfe interviewed many authors, including Malcolm Cowley, Archibald MacLeish, and James T. Farrell. A biographer commented on the thesis: "Reading it, people see what is the worst influence of postgraduate education on many people who suffer through it: It kills all sense of style." Initially rejected, his thesis was finally accepted after he rewrote it in a purpose rather than a subjective style. After leaving Yale, he wrote a friend, explaining through his personal opinion oaths about his thesis. Maps Tom Wolfe
New Journalism and Journalism
Although Wolfe was offered teaching at the academy, he chose to work as a reporter. In 1956, while still preparing his thesis, Wolfe became a reporter for Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wolfe completed his thesis in 1957.
In 1959, he was employed by The Washington Post . Wolfe has said that part of the reason he was hired by Posting is his lack of interest in politics. The Post's city editor "amazed that Wolfe prefers the outskirts of town to Capitol Hill, a tap every reporter wants." He won an award from The Newspaper Guild for foreign reporting in Cuba in 1961 and also won a Guild award for humor. While there, Wolfe experimented with fictional writing techniques in featured stories.
In 1962, Wolfe left Washington D.C. for New York City, taking a position with the New York Herald Tribune as a common task reporter and feature writer. Editors of the Herald Tribune, including Clay Felker of the Sunday section of New York magazine, encouraged their authors to violate the newspaper's writing convention. During a New York City newspaper strike in 1962, Wolfe approached Esquire's magazine about an article about hot rod and Southern California custom car culture. He wrestled with the article until his editor, Byron Dobell, suggested that Wolfe send his notes so they could unite the story.
Wolfe postponed. The night before the deadline, he typed a letter to Dobell explaining what he wanted to say about the matter, ignoring all the journalistic conventions. Dobell's response was to remove the "Dear Byron" greeting from the top of the letter and publish it intact as a reportage. The result, published in 1963, is "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That's Kandy Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Kandy." The article was much discussed - loved by some, hated by others. Her fame helped Wolfe get the publication of her first book, The Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Kandy-Kolored, her collection of Herald-Tribune Esquire , and other publications.
This is what Wolfe New Journalism calls, where some journalists and essays experiment with various literary techniques, mixing it with the traditional idealism of impartial and fair reporting. Wolfe experimented with four literary devices that were typically unrelated to feature writing: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed descriptions of individual life-status symbols (material choices made by people) in writing this stylish form. journalism. He then referred to this style as literary journalism. From the use of status symbols, Wolfe says, "I think every moment of human life, unless the person is starving or in danger of death by other means, is controlled by concern for status."
Wolfe also championed what he called "saturation reporting," a reportary approach in which journalists "shadow" and observed the subject over a long period of time. "To pull it," Wolfe said, "you have to stay with the people you wrote for a long time... long enough so that you really exist when revealing the scenes happening in their lives." Saturation reporting differs from "in-depth" and "investigative" reporting, which involves direct interviews from various sources and/or extensive analysis of external documents related to the story. The reporting of saturation, according to professor of communications Richard Kallan, "requires a more complex set of relationships in which journalists become more involved, more fully reactive, no longer detach and separate from the reported persons and events."
Wolfe Kool-Aid Electric Acid Test is considered a striking example of New Journalism. The story of the Prankster Merry, a famous counter-cultural group in the sixties, was highly experimental in the use of onomatopoeia by Wolfe, free association, and eccentric punctuation - like some exclamation marks and italics - to convey the ideas and personality of maniacs from Ken Kesey and his followers.
In addition to his own work, Wolfe edited the New Journalism collection with EW. Johnson, published in 1973 and titled The New Journalism . This book publishes the works of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and several other famous writers, with the general theme of journalism that incorporates literary techniques and which can be considered literary.
Non-fiction books
In 1965, Wolfe published his collection of articles in this style, The Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Kandy-Kolored , adding to his ability. He published a collection of the second article, The Pump House Gang , in 1968. Wolfe wrote about popular culture, architecture, politics, and other topics underlining, inter alia, how American life in the 1960s was altered by economic prosperity after World War II. The decisive work of this era is the Kool-Aid Electric Test (published on the same day as The Pump House Gang in 1968), which for many people symbolizes the 1960s -an. Although conservative in many ways (in 2008, he claimed to never use LSD and ever tried marijuana only once) Wolfe became one of the leading figures of the decade.
In 1970, he published two essays in book form as Radical Chic & amp; Want a Flat Trap . "Radical Chic" is a party-bitten account given by composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein to raise money for Black Panther Party. "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers" is about practice by some African-Americans who use racial intimidation ("want-mauing") to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers"). The phrase Wolfe, "chic radical", soon became a popular disparaging term for critics to apply to the upper left class. His Mauve Gloves & amp; Madmen, Clutter & amp; Vine (1977) included an essay that Wolfe recorded, "The Decade Me and Third Revival."
In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff , a report about the pilot who became the first astronaut in America. After their training and unofficial, even blind exploitation, he likes these heroes as the "first combat champion" of antiquity, advancing into combat in a space race on behalf of their country. In 1983, the book was adapted as a feature feature film.
In 2016 Wolfe published The Kingdom of Speech, a controversial critique of the work of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. His views on how humans develop speech are described as opinions and are not supported by research.
Art critics
Wolfe also wrote two critics and the social history of modern art and modern architecture, The Painted Word
Made for a TV movie
In 1977, PBS produced Tom Wolfe Los Angeles , a fictitious and satirical TV movie made in Los Angeles. Wolfe appeared in the film as himself.
Novel
Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel to capture the vast reach of American society. Among his models is William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which depicts 19th-century British society. In 1981, he stopped his other work to concentrate on the novel.
Wolfe began researching this novel by observing the case in Manhattan Criminal Court and overshadowing members of the Bronx killing squad. While the study came easily, he found it hard to write. To overcome the writer's block, Wolfe wrote to Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone, to propose an idea derived from Charles Dickens and Thackeray: to make a series of his novels. Wenner offered Wolfe about $ 200,000 to make a story about his work. The pressure of the deadline that often gave him the motivation he expected, and from July 1984 to August 1985, he published a new installment in every biweekly edition of Rolling Stone.
Then Wolfe was unhappy with his "very public first draft" and completely revised his work, even changing Sherman McCoy's protagonist. Wolfe initially made him a writer but reorganized it as a bond seller. Wolfe was researched and revised for two years, and his book The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on the bestseller list and gaining praise from the literary establishment on which Wolfe has been crying for a long time.
Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there is widespread interest in his second work. This novel took him more than 11 years to complete; A Full Men was published in 1998. Her book reception was not universally beneficial, despite receiving glowing reviews at Time , Newsweek , The Wall Street Journal , and elsewhere. The initial print of 1.2 million copies was announced and the book remained at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks. Renowned writer John Updike wrote a critical review for The New Yorker, complaining that the novel "amounted to entertainment, not literature, even literature in the form of a simple candidate." His comments sparked an intense war of words in the print media and aired between Wolfe and Updike, and writers John Irving and Norman Mailer, who also entered the fray.
In 2001, Wolfe published an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges." That year he also published Hooking Up (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novel Ambush at Fort Bragg ). ,
He published his third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), noting the decline of poor and brilliant scholarship students from Alleghany County, North Carolina, after attending an elite university. He conveyed an institution filled with pride, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and sexual intercourse. This novel meets with a warm response by critics. Many social conservatives praise him with the belief that his portrayal expresses a widespread moral decline. The novel won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from London-based Literary Review, an established gift "to draw attention to the rough, tasteless, often random use of portions of the redundancy of sexual descriptions in a modern novel. " Wolfe then explains that such sexual references are intentionally clinical.
Wolfe writes that his purpose in fiction writing is to document contemporary societies in the traditions of John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and ÃÆ' â € ° mile Zola.
Wolfe announced in early 2008 that he left the old publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His fourth novel, Back to Blood , was published in October 2012 by Little, Brown. According to The New York Times , Wolfe paid nearly US $ 7 million for the book. According to the publisher, Back to Blood is about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first."
Critical reception
Kurt Vonnegut says that Wolfe is "the most interesting - or, at least, the most frequent journalist - in a certain time," and "a genius who will do anything to get attention." Paul Fussell calls Wolfe an outstanding writer and states "Reading him is very encouraging not because he makes us hope for the future of man but because he makes us share his enthusiasm with what he feels is true." Criticism Dwight Garner praised Wolfe as a "gifted gifted social observer and satirist" who "makes amulets close and often funny cuts detail" and "not afraid of kicking at the pretensions of literary establishment." Critics, James Wood, underestimated "the great subject, the great man, and the great large yard, no one of the average size arises from his shop, in fact, no real human variation can be found in his fiction, for everyone have the same great stimulus. "
Wolfe in 2000 was criticized by Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, after they were asked if they believed his book deserved critical acclaim. Mailers compared reading Wolfe's novels like having sex with a 300-lb-weighted woman, saying 'Once he gets to the top, it's all over. Falling in love or becoming short of breath. 'Updike is more literary: he claims that one of his books is an amusement of entertainment, not literature, even literature in the simplest form. Irving might be the most dismissive, saying, "It's like reading bad newspapers or bad news in magazines... reading sentences and looking at jokes yourself." Wolfe replied, saying, 'This is raging. This is an extraordinary act. A Full Men panicked Irving in the same way as Updike and Norman. Fear them. Panic them. 'He then calls Updike and Mailer' two piles of old bones' and says again that Irving is afraid of the quality of his work. Later that year he published an essay titled "The Three Stooges" about critics.
Recurring themes
Much of Wolfe's later work discusses neuroscience. He notes his appeal in "Sorry, Your Soul Only Died", one of the essays at Hooking Up . This topic is also featured on I Am Charlotte Simmons , because the title character is a neuroscientist. Wolfe describes the thoughts and emotional processes of character, such as fear, humiliation and lust, in the clinical terminology of brain chemistry. Wolfe also often gives detailed descriptions of various aspects of his character's anatomy.
White settings
Wolfe adopted wearing a white suit as a trademark in 1962. He bought his first white suit, planned to wear it in the summer, in the style of the southern men. She found that the suit she bought was too heavy to use in the summer, so she wore it in the winter, which created a sensation. At that time, white clothing should be provided for summer wear. Wolfe maintains this as a trademark. He sometimes accompanies him with a white tie, a white homburg hat, and two-tone shoes. Wolfe said that the clothes paralyze the people he observes, making them, in their eyes, "a man from Mars, a man who knows nothing and wants to know."
Views
In 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper's Magazine titled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast". He criticized modern American novelists for failing to be fully involved with their subject, and suggested that modern literature could be saved by a greater dependence on journalistic techniques.
Wolfe supported George W. Bush as a political candidate and said he chose him as president in 2004 for what he called "Bush's great assertiveness and willingness to fight." Bush avenged admiration, and is said to have read all of Wolfe's books, according to friends in 2005.
Wolfe's views and choice of subject matter, such as ridiculing left-wing intellectuals at Radical Chic, glorified the astronauts in The Right Stuff and criticized Noam Chomsky in the Kingdom of Speech sometimes resulting in conservative labels. Because of his portrayal of the Black Panther Party in Radical Chic, a party member called him a racist. Wolfe refused such a label. In a 2004 interview at The Guardian, he said that his "idol" in writing about society and culture was ÃÆ' € Zola mile. Wolfe described it as "a left man"; people who "get out, and find lots of ambitious, drunk, lazy and wicked people out there.Zola can not - and is not interested - lie."
Asked to comment by the Wall Street Journal on the blog in 2007 to mark the tenth anniversary of their arrival, Wolfe writes that "the universe of blogs is a hearsay universe" and that "blogs are face guards to the back. "He also took the opportunity to criticize Wikipedia, saying that" only a primitive would believe that word ". He recorded a story about him in his Wikipedia bio article at the time, which he said never happened.
Personal life
Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife Sheila, who designed the cover for Harper's Magazine. They have two children: a daughter, Alexandra, and a son, Tommy.
Death
Wolfe died of an infection in Manhattan on May 14, 2018, at the age of 88.
Influence
The historian Meredith Hindley praised Wolfe for introducing the terms "statusphere", "the right thing", "chic radical", "me decade" and "ol good boy" into the English lexicon.
Wolfe is sometimes wrongly credited with the term "trophy wife". The term for a very thin woman in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities is "X-rays".
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments