Tom Wolfe aka Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American writer and journalist widely known with New Journalism, developing a style of news writing and journalism that incorporated literary techniques in the 1960s and 1970s.
Wolff began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, gaining national prominence in the 1960s after publishing such best-selling books as The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test And two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flake Catchers and The Candy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
In 1979, he published The Right Stuff, an influential book about Mercury seven astronauts, made in the 1983 film of the same name directed by Philip Kaufman.
His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, met with critical acclaim and became a commercial success. It was adapted as a major motion picture of the same name directed by Brian De Palma.
After college, Wolff ventured into a decade-long career as a newspaper reporter with Springfield Union in Massachusetts and then the Washington Post.
There he earned the Washington Newspaper Guild Award for foreign news reporting for coverage of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Like many aspiring young journalists, Wolfe wanted to test himself in New York.
In 1962, he signed with The New York Herald Tribune and wrote for Sunday Supplement to the paper with reporter Jimmy Breslin, which was later published as New York Magazine.
During the 1962 New York newspaper strike, Tom Wolff proposed an article on Southern California hot-rod culture for Esquire magazine.
He struggled with Angle and eventually sent a letter to his editor explaining his ideas, dispensing with traditional journalistic conventions, and describing the entire scene in a personal voice.
The editors were so impressed that they removed the letter’s greeting and published it in its entirety. From this, Wolfe developed his writing style, which became known as “New Journalism”.
In this style, writers experimented with various literary techniques, combining journalistic accuracy with a novelist’s eye for details.
Inspired by the desire to revive social reality in literature – as he expressed in a much-discussed manifesto published in Harper in 1989 – Wolff turned to fiction.
His first two novels were The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987; film 1990), a monumental novel about urban greed and corruption, and A Man in Full (1998), a colorful panoramic depiction of contemporary Atlanta.
Wolff’s Hooking Up (2000) is a collection of fiction and essays that have already been published, in addition to “My Three Stooges,” a scandalous describe John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, all of which A. Man in full are important.
Several other books were published in 1987 before Wolff’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was previously serialized in Rolling Stone magazine. In 1998, his novel A Man in Full was published. Benjamin Torf, the highest-grossing film by a writer, was paid $ 5 million for Tom Wright of Bonfire.