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Tom Wolfe in Full
If you are an admirer of Tom Wolfe, you will find much to enjoy in Michael Lewis’s new Vanity Fair profile of the Man in the White Suit.
Back in 2013, the New York Public Library paid $2.15 million to acquire Wolfe’s archive — including more than 10,000 letters, 100 linear feet of manuscript drafts, and, according to the New York Times, “outlines and research materials for his four novels and 12 other books as well as his uncollected journalism.”
In February, library officials announced that the 200-box collection had been analyzed and indexed and was ready for researchers to dive in. That’s just what Lewis did. It seems like he had a blast.
The article is titled “How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe,” and it delivers on its promise to explain how a 33-year-old son of Richmond, Virginia, with a Ph.D. from Yale and a dead-endish daily reporting job at the New York Herald Tribune managed to transform himself — essentially overnight — into the “leading journalistic observer and describer of American life, in a time of radical cultural transformation, and of the sensational explosion in American literary journalism that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s — on which the ashes and the dust are just now settling.”
It’s a good read. Here’s my favorite bit:
New York City was—and still is—the only place on earth where a writer might set himself up as a professional tour guide and attract the interest of the entire planet. That’s mainly what Wolfe was, at least in the beginning: his job was to observe the sophisticates in their nutty bubble for the pleasure of the rubes in the hinterlands, and then, from time to time, venture out into the hinterlands and explain what is really going on out there to the sophisticates inside the bubble. He moves back and forth like a bridge player, ruffing the city and the country against each other. He occupies a place in between. He dresses exotically and is talented and intellectually powerful, like the sophisticates in the bubble. But he isn’t really one of them. To an extent that shocks the people inside the bubble, when they learn of it, he shares the values of the hinterland. He believes in God, Country, and even, up to a point, Republican Presidents. He even has his doubts about the reach of evolutionary theory.
Enjoy.
Published in Culture, General, Literature
I wish his PhD thesis – “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942” – was available online.
I hate to nitpick, but I’m very curious: Wolfe is on record as to not believing in God. Did he change his mind? Or am I reading Lewis too literally?
It is good read thanks
The title of this post caught my eye, as I’m currently reading A Man in Full. He writes culture like no other contemporary novelist can, and one of the last greats of American literature.
If anyone has a tip about a younger version of Tom, please let me know. Ellis? Maybe, but he’s getting up there, as are we all.
Wolfe is an atheist, but he is not hostile to religion, and in his writings he views the turning away from religion by the educated class as a negative. The essay “Sorry But Your Soul Just Died” is a great read on what is “man” in the modern scientific and digital world. He has great reservations about this idea that man is simply a bunch of neurons or an evolutionary accident.
He does seem to contradict himself, but what Lewis was saying was that he appreciates the “God, Country” worldview more than the elitist, pretentious leftist take on things. Another contradiction is how he also looks and acts the part of a gentry snob, but he has disdain for it if you read his writings.
I’ve always loved Tom Wolfe, and I read everything he puts out. Probably my favorite writer.
Thanks, Matthew!