It’s couched in oh, so delicate terms, as pretty much everyone mourns the death of the great Tom Wolfe. Tom Wolfe was a reporter; Tom Wolfe was an observer. Tom Wolfe eyed status-seeking. Tom Wolfe skewered the establishment. And through his incredible mastery of words, he entertained the hell out of us.
Yes, true enough. But somehow he never got a Nobel Prize in literature, despite vastly outranking almost everyone else who has.
So I guess I am corrupting things a little when I state the obvious about Wolfe: he did write; he did observe; he did skewer; and by gosh, it all added up to making the left look stupid, particularly the cultural left, because it is the establishment. There is no way a writer this honest could not find them. And because he was a ferocious believer in and chronicler of American exceptionalism, he got them good.
More @ LRC
Very impressive writer. I really enjoyed his stuff. Modern classics
ReplyDeleteImpressive indeed. His biography by Elizabeth Nowell is good.
Delete