Tom Wolfe

A colorful cast of residents and visitors to Miami go about their daily activities, both legal and illegal. The police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay with officer Nestor Camacho on board. Into the feverous landscape of the only city in the world where people from a different country with a different language and a different culture have taken over at the ballot box. This melting pot is full of hard cases who just won't melt, damn it. He...

No one skewers the popular movements of American culture like Tom Wolfe. In 1975, he turned his satirical pen to the pretensions of the contemporary art world, a world of social climbing, elitist posturing, and ingeniously absurd self-justifying theorizing. He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. In the process he debunks the great American...

In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, "black rage," and "white guilt" in our status-minded world. In "These Radical Chic Evenings," Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene and its astonishing repercussions with...

Tom Wolfe's much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe's ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic...

America's "peerless observer" (People) uncovers college life-from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating-plus race, class, sex, and basketball. Dupont University-the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But...

Only yesterday, boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the year 2000, we can forget about necking. Today's girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today's first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling...

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelist When Tom Wolfe smashed his way into the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his second book, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The Pump House Gang is the result: a collection of essays that chronicles...

"In the short space of one decade, a new style of reportage has taken hold to the point where it has all but supplanted the novel as the most revered, prestigious and powerful literary form. Writers with reputations as fine novelists turned to writing the New Journalism; feature writers for newspapers, thinking themselves to be marking time until they, too, wrote The Novel, began writing the New Journalism. Tom Wolfe, who has watched and helped this...