'My entire career,' he said, 'in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.' from Yale in American studies, and all his life he remained a distinctively American writer, focused on American subjects.īut most of the people he wrote about came from very different worlds. He earned a degree in English at Washington and Lee and a Ph.D. (It never occurred to me when I was a teenager, but Wolfe was about the same age as my father.)īorn in Richmond, Va., Wolfe was raised in a genteel Southern family, no doubt an upbringing that nurtured his keen sense of social hierarchy and status markers. Wolfe wrote so often and incisively about the counterculture of the '60s and '70s that he came to be identified with it, but he never drank that electric Kool-Aid, and he was no baby boomer. No reader would mistake Wolfe for Thompson, or either one for Didion. The New Journalism umbrella came to cover a lot of writers - Wolfe, Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and others - but perhaps the most powerful common element in their writing was that each developed a highly personal voice. I don't think people think in essays it's one exclamation point to another.')Īt the same time, other writers were adopting similar approaches to journalistic writing: lively and literary language, immersive reporting rather than one-off interviews, stacks of vivid details, dramatic scenes incorporating long stretches of dialogue and subjects treated with a depth and intimacy previously granted only to fictional characters. 'People complain about my exclamation points,' he once said, 'but I honestly think that's the way people think. He might just be the original source of the metastasis of exclamation points on social media.

I wanted to seize my mild-mannered high school journalism teacher by the arm and shout, 'Can we do that?!!?' When I was a teenager in the 1960s, reading The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (his account of a road trip with hallucinogen enthusiast and author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters) felt like grabbing a live wire - or taking a hit of that acid.

Thompson's) made me want to be a journalist. But for my money his nonfiction work is his major achievement, not only because much of it is terrific but because it had so much impact on so many other writers.

Kurt Vonnegut called him 'a genius who will do anything to get attention,' a double-edged compliment Wolfe might have wished he thought of first.īecause he wrote four bestselling novels later in his career, many readers think of Wolfe as a novelist. Wolfe himself, a dapper figure in bespoke white suits (he called them 'neo-pretentious'), became almost as well known for his public persona as for his work.

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