My favorite writer. No one had his finger on the pulse of American life like Tom Wolfe, and no other writer could make me laugh out loud so hard. Early in his career, Radical Chic just skewered the phony, hypocritical New York lefties, and forever put him on the bad side of the New York literary critics.

Rarely does it feel to me like a personal loss when a public figure dies, but this one does. RIP Tom Wolfe, you'll be missed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...list-dies-at-88.html

Tom Wolfe, RIP

William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

If you haven't read “The Bonfire of the Vanities”, read it!

Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.

The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities are two of my favorites. He was born and grew up here in Richmond.

R.I.P. sir.

quote:

Originally posted by justjoe:
My favorite writer. No one had his finger on the pulse of American life like Tom Wolfe, and no other writer could make me laugh out loud so hard. Early in his career, Radical Chic just skewered the phony, hypocritical New York lefties, and forever put him on the bad side of the New York literary critics.

Rarely does it feel to me like a personal loss when a public figure dies, but this one does. RIP Tom Wolfe, you'll be missed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...list-dies-at-88.html

And who could forget Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers? I still laugh at that title. Certainly one of my favorite contemporary writers back in the day. RIP, Tom Wolfe.

RIP. Enjoyed reading his work.

Indeed. Wolfe will be missed.

I think I need a white suit…

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

RIP. For those of you who may want to know a thing or two about the 1960s, read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. It is about the recreational use of LSD before it was made illegal.

I enjoyed The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test...Bonfire Of The Vanities not so much. I should probably try it again.

This is an excerpt from The Right Stuff (appearing in an article about Wolfe). He is writing here about Chuck Yeager, and all of Wolfe's genius is on display:

"“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot … coming over the intercom … with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring) … the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy’ … the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): ‘Now, folks, uh … this is the captain … ummmm … We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin gears’re not … uh … lockin into position when we lower ‘em … Now … I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right’ … faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you … ‘But … I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light … so we’re gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a visual inspection of those ol’ landin’ gears’—with which he is obviously on intimate ol’-buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship—’and if I’m right … they’re gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun’ an’ we’ll jes take her on in’ … and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: ‘Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground—it must be too early for ‘em or somethin’—I ‘spect they still got the sleepers in their eyes … ‘cause they say they caint tell if those ol’ landin’ gears are all the way down or not … But, you know, up here in the cockpit we’re convinced they’re all the way down, so we’re jes gonna take her on in … And oh’ … (I almost forgot) … ‘while we take a little swing out over the ocean an’ empty some of that surplus fuel we’re not gonna be needin’ anymore—that’s what you might be seein’ comin’ out of the wings—our lovely little ladies … if they’ll be so kind … they’re gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call “assumin’ the position” ‘ … another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it’s so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it) … and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered … while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field—and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were … how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation most intimately … how could he keep on drawlin’ and chucklin’ and driftin’ and lollygaggin’ in that particular voice of his—

Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it!—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin…. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation…. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.” [From Chapter 3, The Right Stuff.]

sad news

I loved "The Right Stuff." Wolfe told that story so well, it's one of the few books I've read multiple times.

I love that book despite Wolfe lionizing Yeager, who is a jerk IMO.

I really enjoyed the only book by Wolfe I have read, A Man In Full. RIP to a fellow Richmonder.

Here is a recent article from our local newspaper containing a letter that Wolfe wrote to a guy who bought his childhood home. It shows off Wolfe's marvelous writing style. (Justjoe, are you there?)

Link

The link doesn't work for me, Jim.

I tried it again, and it did work. . Thank you for that. The letter is absolutely wonderful. He clearly had a very happy childhood and adored his parents. I have a personal letter from Tom Wolfe dating from 2008, and it's completely written in the beautiful calligraphy that begin and end that long letter in the article.

Here is a good article about why Wolfe never won the Nobel Prize for literature-- and it's because he relentlessly satirized the left and exposed them for the phonies and fools that they are.

It quotes a great passage from Radical Chic, which is about a cocktail party held by Leonard Bernstein for the Black Panthers. Here is the passage, which made me laugh out loud when I originally read it, and which always makes me grin:

"MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. THESE ARE NICE. LITTLE Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat out here on the hors d'oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?"



https://www.americanthinker.co...eft_look_stupid.html