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Collection Data
- Description
- Tom Wolfe is an American author and journalist known for such works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. He is a pioneer of the New Journalism and has been an outspoken advocate for the revival of social realism in American fiction. The Tom Wolfe papers, dated 1930 to 2016, comprehensively document Wolfe's career, providing insight into his writing process and the development of his signature style; the professional relationships he maintained with editors, writers, and cultural critics; his social life in New York City; and readers' responses to his published work. The collection includes draft manuscripts, outlines, research files, correspondence, lectures, photographs, and drawings.
- Names
- Wolfe, Tom (Creator)
- Buckley, William F., Jr., 1925-2008 (Correspondent)
- Dietz, Lawrence (Correspondent)
- Lish, Gordon (Correspondent)
- Strachan, Patricia (Correspondent)
- Straus, Roger W. (Roger Williams), 1917-2004 (Correspondent)
- Thompson, Hunter S. (Correspondent)
- Tyrrell, R. Emmett (Correspondent)
- Van Petten, O. W. (Contributor)
- Wenner, Jann (Contributor)
- Wolfe, Tom (Author)
- Wolfe, Tom (Addressee)
- Wong, Kailey (Correspondent)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 1930 - 2016
- Library locations
- Manuscripts and Archives Division
- Shelf locator: MssCol 22833
- Topics
- Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
- American literature -- 20th century
- Authors -- United States
- Authors and publishers
- Authors and readers
- Authors, American -- 20th century
- Journalism -- United States
- Journalists -- United States
- Nonfiction novel
- Social realism in literature
- Authors
- Journalists
- United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
- Genres
- Manuscripts
- Correspondence
- Interviews
- Lectures
- Photographs
- Drawings
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930 to Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., an agronomist, and Helen Hughes Wolfe of Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, where he wrote for the school paper, The Pine Needle, and developed an early interest in the profession of writing. From 1947 to 1951, Wolfe attended Washington and Lee University, where he helped found the university's literary magazine, the Shenandoah; wrote for the university's monthly magazine, Southern Collegian; and was the sports editor for the student-run weekly newspaper, Ring-tum Phi. He graduated in 1951 and later that year entered the doctoral program in American Studies at Yale University. Wolfe completed his dissertation on communism in the League of American Writers in 1956 and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1957.
While finishing his dissertation, Wolfe began applying for writing positions at newspapers throughout the United States, and was hired by the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. From 1956 to 1959, he worked for the Union as a general assignment reporter, with most of his stories appearing without byline. The newspaper published his courtroom sketches of criminal trials, and his caricatures were featured in the Sunday edition of the paper. In 1959, Wolfe was hired as a city desk reporter and the Latin American correspondent for the Washington Post. He spent several months in the Caribbean and wrote multi-part stories on the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba. His feature stories for the Post, such as "A Status Seeker's Guide to Washington," explore themes he would revisit in his better-known work.
In 1962, Wolfe moved to New York City to work as a general assignment reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. While writing deadline journalism for the city desk, he simultaneously pursued feature stories that were published in the Sunday magazine of the Herald Tribune (the predecessor to New York magazine) as well as in Esquire magazine. Under Herald Tribune editor Clay Felker, Wolfe's signature nonfiction style began to take shape. Many of his early features drew heavily on the use of stylistic punctuation, onomatopoeia, and present tense dialogue, including "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!;" "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" about William Shawn and The New Yorker; and "What If He Is Right," a profile of Marshall McLuhan. These features also exemplify his wide-ranging but enduring interest in popular culture, the zeitgeist of New York City and other American cities in the mid-20th century, and the state of modern literature and art. In 1965, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) published a compilation of Wolfe's feature stories written between 1962 and 1965, entitled The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His next two books, The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, were published by FSG on the same day in 1968, and firmly established Wolfe's reputation as a leader in the burgeoning New Journalism movement.
Throughout the 1970s, Wolfe published seven books and several landmark magazine features, including Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970); "The Birth of the New Journalism" and the anthology The New Journalism (1973); "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening," "The Intelligent Co-Ed's Guide to America," and other essays collected in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine (1976); and "Post-Orbital Remorse," which he later developed into the book The Right Stuff (1979). As his stature in the literary world grew, Wolfe began delivering lectures for academic and popular audiences on topics that he explored in his work: journalism, popular culture, and literary criticism. As a contributing editor to Harper's magazine, his writing branched into cultural and art criticism with the essays later republished by FSG in The Painted Word (1975) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981). He also produced a regular column for Harper's in the late 1970s, "In Our Time," with humorous drawings and captions that satirized a variety of social classes and popular activities in New York City. These drawings were collected and published with an introductory essay by Wolfe in In Our Time (1980). In 1982, FSG published The Purple Decades, a reader of Wolfe's most popular writings from the 1960s and 1970s.
In the early 1970s, Wolfe developed the idea for a novel, written using reporting techniques, which would explore the cultural milieu of the decade and social class tensions in New York City. Though he conducted some research for the project, Wolfe was unable to begin work in earnest for the novel that would become The Bonfire of the Vanities until 1981. The novel was serialized in Rolling Stone between 1984 and 1985, then revised and expanded for publication by FSG in 1987. The Bonfire of the Vanities was an unprecedented bestseller, equally well-received by critics and readers, which encouraged Wolfe to continue writing novels. He subsequently published A Man in Full (1998), focused on real estate, sports celebrity, and African-American culture in Atlanta, Georgia; I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), exploring early 21st century college life and sports; and Back to Blood, published by Little, Brown in 2012, centered on the Cuban community, immigration, and the art world in Miami, Florida.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Wolfe continued to publish short nonfiction, developing interests in modern technology and the implications of evolution and neuroscience on philosophical concepts of free will. Essays and a novella from the late 1990s were featured in the collection Hooking Up (2000). In 2006, Wolfe was invited to deliver the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, titled "The Human Beast," which discussed the history of Darwinism and evolution. Wolfe's final book The Kingdom of Speech continued his interest in Darwinism and evolution, critiquing Darwin's theories and Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories of universal grammar.
Tom Wolfe died in New York City on May 14, 2018.
- Content: The Tom Wolfe papers, dated 1930 to 2016, comprehensively document Wolfe's career as a journalist and author, from his earliest news stories published in the Springfield Union through his 2016 book The Kingdom of Speech. The collection shows the development of Wolfe's distinctive style and the evolution of his works from first draft to newspaper, magazine, and book publication. The papers provide insight into his writing process; his professional relationships with editors, writers, and cultural critics; his social life in New York City; and readers' responses to his published work throughout his career.
The majority of the collection consists of correspondence, draft manuscripts, and research files. The collection documents all of Wolfe's books, most of his magazine features, and some early newspaper work, with the bulk of the papers dating from 1960 to 1988.
The correspondence in the collection documents Wolfe's social and professional relationships, and discusses his writings; the work of fellow journalists and authors; and his subject interests in youth and popular culture, art, sociology, and literature. The collection has few outgoing letters by Wolfe. Correspondence contains letters from editors and publishers Pat Strachan, Roger Straus, Gordon Lish, Jann Wenner, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Emmett Tyrrell; agents Lynn Nesbit and Pat Kavanagh; fellow journalists Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese; and sources for his work such as activist Kailey Wong and writers Larry Dietz and Bill van Petten. The collection also contains many letters from readers of Wolfe's work.
Wolfe's writings from throughout his career are represented by draft manuscripts, outlines, and synopses of feature articles, essays, short stories, and books. The collection contains multiple versions of draft and revised manuscripts, which show the evolution of works throughout the writing process. Manuscript files also contain drafts of excised and unpublished scenes and chapters, as well as project-specific research files, outlines, editorial correspondence, and promotion files.
Research files are available for almost every book documented in the collection, as well as many of Wolfe's articles and essays. These files consist primarily of stenography notebooks (often labeled "Books of Numbers") that contain handwritten notes, observations, interview transcriptions, and scene descriptions. Research files also include clippings, photographs, printed material, and sound recordings of interviews gathered by Wolfe during the research phase of many writing projects. The research files chart the creation of Wolfe's books, essays, and articles, and, together with his manuscripts, show how his observations and interviews were translated into published works.
The papers also include lectures, drawings, sketches, and photographs.
- Physical Description
- Extent: 98.03 linear feet (236 boxes, 1 volume, 4 oversize folders, 8 audio files)
- Type of Resource
- Text
- Sound recording
- Identifiers
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b20522059
- MSS Unit ID: 22833
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): d2f9f900-4a13-0139-34b3-0242ac110002
