Tom Wolfe has died. He was 88. Kyle Smith remembers when he first read Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (“To this day, no book has ever hit me harder.”). Tina Brown laments that he died at a time when we need him most: “He loved to stir it up. He loved to skewer political correctness. I’d love to have the 60-year-old Wolfe working now in what is such an intellectually inhospitable time.” There will be other remembrances to follow, no doubt, but until then, re-read Andrew Ferguson’s review of The Bonfire of the Vanities or Joseph Bottum’s take on I Am Charlotte Simmons. Or watch William F. Buckley’s interview of the writer on Firing Line (Wolfe on Radical Chic: “It turned out, I was the man who laughed in church. You know, the man who laughs in church—nobody ever asks him what’s funny. They always say ‘How dare you?’ That’s the only question you get.”) In the interview with Buckley, Wolfe is not wearing his famous white suit. Why did he eventually decide to wear white year-round? Guy Trebay explains: “Just by wearing white after Labor Day, he became the talk of any room he entered, and getting dressed each morning evolved for him into ‘a harmless form of assault.’ Unexpectedly, this became a boon for Mr. Wolfe’s reporting, according to Lynn Nesbit, the writer’s longtime literary agent. ‘It was counterintuitive, but he sort of knew that if he dressed like that, his subjects would learn to trust him,’’ she said.” Last, check out these words for which Wolfe is the earliest known source.
Ralph Wood considers the prescience of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins: “William F. Buckley Jr. wryly suggested that all future presidents should be required to swear a double oath of office: not only to uphold and defend the Constitution but also to have read, marked, learned, and digested Percy’s Love in the Ruins. ‘It’s all there in that one book,’ said Buckley, ‘what’s happening to us and why.’ Indeed, Percy’s novel reads as if it were written in anticipation of the 2016 presidential election.”
