An acolyte of authors of ‘realistic’ fiction, Tom Wolfe was an American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it and helped demonstrate that journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.

His hyperbolic, stylised writing was a gleeful fusillade of exclamation points, italics and improbable words. An ingenious phrase maker, he branded such expressions as “radical chic” for rich liberals’ fascination with revolutionaries; and the “Me” generation, defining the self-absorbed babyboomers of the 1970s.

Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City. He ended up writing one himself: The Bonfire of the Vanities. His work broke countless rules, but was grounded in old-school journalism, in an obsessive attention to detail that began with his first reporting job and endured for decades. “Nothing fuels the imagination more than real facts do,” Wolfe said. “As the saying goes, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.’”

The white-suited wizard of ‘New Journalism’ who exuberantly chronicled American culture, passed away this week at age 88

The Bonfire of the Vanities was one of the top 10 selling books of the ’80s. Its follow-up, A Man in Full, was another best-seller. Wolfe satirised college misbehaviour in I Am Charlotte Simmons and was still at it in his 80s with Back to Blood, a sprawling, multicultural story of sex and honour set in Miami.

Wolfe began his career as a reporter. But it wasn’t until the mid-’60s that his work made him a national trendsetter. As Wolfe helped define it, New Journalism combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.

“She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way,” he wrote in a typical piece, describing actress-socialite Baby Jane Holzer. “Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened — swock! — like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of ... zebra! Those motherless stripes!”

Wolfe had many detractors who panned his “big subjects, big people and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability.” But his fans included millions of book-buyers, literary critics and fellow authors.

*By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 20th, 2018