The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe

Author of The Right Stuff and other journalistic writings in a literary vein and the novel Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe has been lauded and vilified by the critics for breaking down the barriers between fact and fiction, journalism and literature, and for his stylistic idiosyncrasies. Beginning with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, published in 1965, he has turned his keen eye and high spirits--some would say mean spirits--to the sacred cows and icons of art, architecture, fashion, and politics as well as to cults and the drug culture, the Beautiful People, astronauts, and Wall Street stockbrokers. Doug Shomette collects from four to eight representative reviews and critical commentaries on each of Wolfe's eleven major works, including essays by novelists Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and John Hersey, scholars Alan Trachtenberg and Albert Bergesen, journalist Garry Wills, and critic Hilton Kramer. Shomette's judicious introduction summarizes these fifty-four pieces as well as other notable critical reactions not reprinted. Also included is a chronology of important events in Wolfe's career; a bibliography of additional readings; and an index. An informative and entertaining reader and reference book, this work will be engrossing and enlightening to anyone who reads and enjoys Tom Wolfe or who is a student of postmodernism, contemporary literature, and the New Journalism.