Book Review: Tom Wolfe, by William McKeen (1995)

The cover of Tom Wolfe, by William McKeen, 1995. (Standard photo on the Tom Wolfe bookshelf, by Mark C. Taylor)

William McKeen’s 1995 book on Tom Wolfe, titled simply Tom Wolfe, and part of the Twayne’s United States Authors Series, was the first book-length examination of the career of one of the most important American writers of the last fifty years. McKeen’s book is not a biography of Wolfe, although he does include biographical information about Wolfe’s life. Like many other sources on Wolfe, McKeen gives the incorrect year for Wolfe’s birth, 1931, instead of the correct year, 1930. (Even Wolfe’s obituary in The New York Times originally had the wrong year.) 

McKeen’s book follows Wolfe through his career, as he moved from newspaper reporter to freelance journalist to best-selling novelist. McKeen obviously did his homework, and one of the most interesting parts of the book was his coverage of Wolfe’s 1959-1962 stint working at The Washington Post. Wolfe covered a variety of topics for the Post, and while most Washington reporters wanted to cover politics, Wolfe enjoyed writing stories about off-beat subjects. Thanks to McKeen’s bibliography, we’re given a long list of Wolfe’s articles for the Post, which range from the banal-sounding “Holiday Gets Cold Start, Mild Finish,” to a 12-part series titled “The Dispensable Guide,” Wolfe’s “mock Michelin Guide to the cities President Eisenhower was visiting overseas.” (McKeen, p.20) 

One of the things that’s so striking about Tom Wolfe’s work is its range. Wolfe certainly had a consistent lens through which he viewed the world. It’s all about status! How people acquire status and how they choose to display it are two questions that are central to Wolfe’s work. Wolfe’s interest in status was already highly developed by the time he published his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965. But within that lens of status, Wolfe covered a huge range of subjects—from his early pieces for Esquire magazine chronicling new movements among American teenagers, to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, to the adventures of the Mercury 7 astronauts, to book-length essays on modern art and architecture, to his fiction, where he brought the reader inside the world of New York City bond traders who thought themselves to be “masters of the universe,” to Atlanta in the 1990’s, and to the diverse ethnic groups in Miami. 

Looking back, it makes perfect sense that Wolfe’s Ph.D. was in American Studies. Wolfe was interested in everything about America, and that’s reflected in the range of his writing. In his best writing, Wolfe was combining elements of history, politics, sociology, economics, and sometimes religion as well. 

Wolfe’s move to the New York Herald-Tribune in 1962 allowed him the space and freedom to write the kinds of stories that intrigued him. During this time, he was also writing for New York, the Sunday supplement of the Herald-Tribune. Wolfe also started writing longer articles for Esquire, and it was his piece for that magazine about a car customizing show in California that proved to be a breakthrough in his writing style. “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” found Wolfe up against a deadline with a serious case of writer’s block. Wolfe sat down at the typewriter to bash out his notes for Esquire editor Byron Dobell, which someone else would then tart up into some kind of a story. Except Wolfe sat there all night long and bashed out a 49-page memo to Dobell. When Dobell finished reading it, he merely struck the “Dear Byron” off the beginning of Wolfe’s memo, and a new voice in American journalism was born. 

McKeen examines the most significant essays that appeared in the first two collections of Wolfe’s non-fiction, but there are interesting pieces of writing from these books that McKeen didn’t write about. 

An amusing story is that when Tom Wolfe first burst on the scene, people thought he might be the novelist Thomas Wolfe, of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again fame—even though Thomas Wolfe had died in 1938. McKeen writes: “He received many letters from admirers who professed admiration for his journalism as well as his earlier literary works, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. The letter writers often wondered why there had been such a long gap between publication of his books.” (McKeen, p.11) Adding to the confusion was the fact that Tom Wolfe was actually Tom Wolfe, Jr. His father was an agronomist and also a writer and editor. Wolfe said of his father, “I always thought of him as a writer. He kept the novels of Thomas Wolfe on his bookshelf, and for years I thought he’d written them.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.201) In an effort to head off any possible confusion, the first edition dust jacket of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby specifically said that Tom Wolfe wasn’t related to Thomas Wolfe.

In his coverage of what came to be called New Journalism, McKeen offers brief sketches of other important figures in that literary movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson. These sketches are helpful for setting Wolfe’s own work in a historical context, and showing how controversial the New Journalism movement was at the time. Capote, for example, disdained the term, famously calling his book In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel,” whatever on earth that was. What Capote had actually done was to use techniques that fiction writers used and applied them to a non-fiction subject. Although the caveat should be added that we now know that Capote did invent some scenes—like the last one in the book, in which investigator Alvin Dewey visits the graves of the Clutter family. 

McKeen’s chapter about The Right Stuff is excellent, and he even quoted from the same long description of Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton that I used in my review. McKeen gives a too-long plot summary of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I wish instead that McKeen had more to say about the Rolling Stone version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe serialized the novel as he was writing it in 27 issues of Rolling Stone in 1984-5, and then made some significant changes before publishing the novel in 1987. Wolfe even changed the occupation of the main character—in the Rolling Stone version Sherman McCoy is a writer, rather than a bond trader.

The book doesn’t pry into Wolfe’s private life, but that seems fitting. Despite Wolfe’s great fame and his flamboyant sartorial splendor, he never made headlines for his private life. As McKeen astutely writes, “Wolfe embodies Flaubert’s advice to writers to be regular and orderly in their lives in order to be wild and original in their work.” (McKeen, p.130) McKeen also grasps Wolfe’s iconoclasm, and his willingness to go against popular opinion and attack the hypocrisies of both the left and the right. There were never any sacred cows for Tom Wolfe. 

McKeen’s book is an excellent examination of the works of Tom Wolfe, and McKeen’s writing and insights about Wolfe are sharp throughout. The used copy of Tom Wolfe that I bought is a former library book, from the Fairfax County Public Library, in Wolfe’s home state of Virginia. According to a stamp in the back it was withdrawn because of low demand, which is a cruel fate for such a fine book about a great writer.