{"id":13160,"date":"2018-05-15T21:11:06","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T19:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/?p=13160"},"modified":"2018-05-15T21:11:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-15T19:11:06","slug":"tom-wolfe-pyrotechnic-new-journalist-and-novelist-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/?p=13160","title":{"rendered":"Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic \u2018New Journalist\u2019 and Novelist, Dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

New York Times – Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan\u2019s moneyed status-seekers in works like \u201cThe Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,\u201d \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d and \u201cBonfire of the Vanities,\u201d died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
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\nHis death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.
\nIn his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.
\nBut as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue \u2014 a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, \u201cNeo-pretentious.\u201d
\nIt was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the<\/p>\n

pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which \u2014 like \u201cRadical Chic\u201d and \u201cthe Me Decade\u201d \u2014 became American idioms.
\nHis talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.
\n\u201cAs a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,\u201d Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. \u201cHis prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word \u2018hernia\u2019 57 times.\u201d
\nWilliam F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: \u201cHe is probably the most skillful writer in America \u2014 I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.\u201d
\nFrom 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. \u201cThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,\u201d an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, \u201cstill the best account \u2014 fictional or non, in print or on film \u2014 of the genesis of the \u201960s hipster subculture,\u201d the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book\u2019s 40th anniversary.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Times – Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan\u2019s moneyed status-seekers in works like \u201cThe Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,\u201d \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d and \u201cBonfire of the Vanities,\u201d died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[388],"tags":[861,6724,6722,1443,6723,6721,6720,6262],"class_list":["post-13160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slide","tag-dies","tag-at-88","tag-journalist","tag-new","tag-novelist","tag-pyrotechnic","tag-tom","tag-wolfe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13163,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13160\/revisions\/13163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aldiplomasy.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}