Tom Wolfe, creator of the New Journalism and author of The Right Stuff, dies at 87
The white-suited ‘dandy’ and literary game-changer was on the best-seller lists for decades, starting with his first novel turned Oscar-winning film, The Bonfire of the Vanities
New York — Tom Wolfe, the ice-cream-suited dandy and prose provocateur who took a new mixture of journalism and literary techniques to mind-bending heights in works such as Radical Chic and The Right Stuff, has died. He was 87. He died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital, in New York where he lived, according to the New York Times, citing his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Wolfe had been hospitalised with an infection. A founding father of what became known as New Journalism, Wolfe added the terms "pushing the outside of the envelope" and "good ol’ boy" to the American lexicon. He branded the navel-gazing 1970s the "Me Decade" and dubbed high-flying Wall Street bond traders "Masters of the Universe" in his first work of fiction, The Bonfire of the Vanities. His non-fiction work, most prominently in New York magazine and Esquire, followed a path laid in reporting by Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin. Recalling a Breslin piece with admiration, Wolfe wrote in New York magazine in 1972: "There i...
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