Tom Wolfe – författare

Now featuring an introduction by Geoff Dyer, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a wild, psychedelic, utterly Wolfe-ian romp through the rise of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Tom Wolfe’s seminal portrait of Ken Kesey, one of the most magnetic figures of the 1960s, and his band of Merry Pranksters. Along the way, even as Wolfe vividly recounts the group’s infamous Acid Tests and the country’s changing attitudes toward psychedelic drugs, he ropes in a who’s who of the early years of the hippie movement, from the Hells Angels to the Grateful Dead to Allen Ginsberg.Wolfe’s clear, unblinking depiction of the travels, experiments, and exploits of his subjects have made his book the quintessential text in New Journalism, which he was instrumental in creating.Readers will find an unparalleled examination of this pivotal moment in American history. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a prescient, evergreen classic, as groundbreaking now as it was when it first stormed onto the scene and forever changed what we thought nonfiction was capable of.

Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the critically acclaimed author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Bonfire of the Vanities is vintage Tom Wolfe at his best.“No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton.” —The National Review“A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” —The New RepublicThe Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s panoramic novel of the go-go New York City of the 1980s, has lost none of its furious luster. Its portrait of power (those who have it and those who want it) and the book’s dissection of racial tensions simmering below the city’s gleaming veneer have only grown more pointed with time. Wolfe is unblinking, lavish, gleeful, and damning in this larger-than-life vision of the ’80s, reinforcing his reputation as an unmatched chronicler of the twisted, contradictory, and glamorous abodes of powerand wealth.

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. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.As Charlotte encounters Dupont''s privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont''s godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university''s "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ''00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America''s master chronicler.

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia-a racially mixed, late-twentieth-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality.

Charlie has a 29,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt. Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland, California, and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.

And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek "the Canon" Fanon, a homegrown product of the city's slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city's delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates-Wolfe shows us contemporary turn-of-the-century America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him one of our most admired talked-about novelists.

“An excellent book by a genius.” —Kurt VonnegutA generation-defining portrait of the 1960s by the master of New Journalism.Tom Wolfe raised the banner for his high-octane brand of New Journalism with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his first book of essays, which collects stories from corners of 1960s America that few had described before. With a thrilling flair for detail, Wolfe creates an indelible portrait of the era—from the burgeoning ersatz glamor of Las Vegas, to the hot-rodding world of car customizers, to a close-up look at the working lives of New York City doormen.These essays are a testament to Wolfe’s unparalleled ability to capture the zeitgeist on the page, bringing it to life with colorful and unusual characters and an inimitable ear for a new kind of American idiom. The force and depth of his writing endures decades after his debut, reaffirming, yet again, his role as a foundational figure in the development of a truly American school of language and journalism.

Now with an original introduction by David Brooks, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a funny and irreverent study of class and status by the master of New Journalism.Tom Wolfe’s two-act dissection of 1970s race relations in America is incisive and thought-provoking, an indispensable study in how white pieties have often worked against the interests of Black communities in the country.Wolfe first takes readers back to his original hotbed of 1970s “radical chic”: the party for the Black Panthers that Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted at their Park Avenue penthouse. Wolfe’s unerring eye for the uncanny feasts on an improbable scene that would morph into today’s cocktail activism—well-heeled elites signifying their sympathy with causes related to Black emancipation through hobnobbing.“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” meanwhile, unfolds on the other side of the country, in San Francisco’s Office of Economic Opportunity, where Wolfe details with Kafkaesque absurdity the dysfunction, chaos, and corruption that waylays this outgrowth of the War on Poverty so that it inevitably ends up failing the underserved communities it’s supposed to help.

“Tom Wolfe at his very best” (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name and the eight-part Disney+ miniseries.Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the New York Times bestselling author Robin Sloan.What does it take to be an astronaut?First published in 1979, Tom Wolfe’s astounding book The Right Stuff answers this question and more, exploring both the mental and the physical sacrifices that must be made by individuals entering space. Wolfe tells the stories of the pilots, engineers, and astronauts involved in Project Mercury (1958–1963), the United States’ first human spaceflight program.A breathtaking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the heroism and courage of the first American astronauts to conquer space, The Right Stuff is a true American classic.

Tom Wolfe shows us the mad spectacle of American life at millennium’s end.​​Tom Wolfe surveys America on the threshold of a new millennium, observing “the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000.”No corner of the frantically, gropingly changing country is sheltered from his keen, satirical eye. He fixes his gaze on the transformations in the mating rituals of the American teenager, and examines how quantum advances in science are changing the way we see ourselves. Hooking Up also brings back Wolfe’s infamous diatribe lampooning his contemporaries Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, and his legendary profile of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker.With Hooking Up, Wolfe shows us a vision of America raring to change as it enters a new era.

A collection of impeccably observed stories, sketches, and essays in full, exuberant, classic Wolfe mode.Originally published in 1976, these stories, essays, and illustrations capture the full spectrum of the ’70s (“the Me Decade,” in Wolfe’s memorable words), from the hilarious to the hard-hitting. Reissued for today’s reader, the third installment in Wolfe’s trilogy of essay-length works after The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is wide-ranging, irreverent, colorful, and gimlet-eyed.