America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!

—Tom Wolfe, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”



Tom Wolfe, who had a genius for garnering publicity, would not have been disappointed by that accompanying his death on May 14 at the age of 88: praising op-eds in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, a page on his stylishness in the latter and a full page, with four photographs, recounting his life in the former. There were two further articles in the Wall Street Journal, two in the Washington Post, and pieces in Time, Forbes, the New Yorker, and just about every other general-interest publication, print and online both. The words “great” and “greatness” were much bandied about.

All mentioned Wolfe’s clothes, the dandiacal get-ups, chiefly in white, with foppish accoutrements—high-collared shirts and homburgs and co-respondent shoes—without which, so far as anyone knows, he never left his apartment. One obituarist, Graeme Wood in the American Scholar, wrote that Wolfe “leaves behind a widow, two children, and (one assumes) a grieving Upper East Side dry cleaner.” Mark Twain, in his day, was known as the “Man in White.” Whether Tom Wolfe in selecting his wardrobe set out to be the Twain of our own day is not known—he left no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn certainly—but the white duds seem to have worked in gaining attention for both men.