Summer Bummer

Published June 29, 2018 8:14am ET



First up was Tom Wolfe.

The white-suited chronicler of the latter half of the American Century—from the space race to the acid tests to the Me Decade and beyond—died May 14 at the age of 88. Of the so-called New Journalists, that coterie of penmen who told nonfictional (maybe fudging a bit here and there) stories in the manner of fiction writers, Wolfe was arguably the best. Like some of the others in this class (e.g., Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Norman Mailer), he could switch smoothly between richly written histories (The Right Stuff), on-the-spot reporting (Radical Chic), cultural commentary (From Bauhaus to Our House), and literary fiction (The Bonfire of the Vanities).

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