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Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Tom Wolfe
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights
-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
211 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
7 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,715 books2,020 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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January 3, 2020
Tom Wolfe! One of the major writers of our time! The man who introduced phrases like “pushing the envelope,” “the me generation,” “radical chic,” and “masters of the universe” into our language! And yet, for some reason, Wolfe was never fully accepted by the East Coast critical establishment. For example, compare Wolfe’s obituary in The New York Times to Philip Roth’s. Those two writers passed away just eight days apart in 2018. But while Roth’s obituary includes a video the Times taped with Roth specifically for his obituary, Wolfe’s obit includes nothing of the sort. I’m not trying to suggest that either Wolfe or Roth was a “better” writer than the other, I’m merely pointing out that Roth was clearly anointed by The New York Times as a “Great and Important Writer” and Wolfe wasn’t. The New York Times even got the date of Wolfe’s first book wrong: it was published in 1965, not 1968.
There aren’t very many books about Tom Wolfe or his writing. One of the few is Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe, published by Chelsea House Publishers in 2001. The volume was edited by literary critic Harold Bloom, and it presents essays about Wolfe’s work that were published from 1974 to 1999.
Bloom’s introduction damns Wolfe with faint praise. “Wolfe is a grand entertainer, a true moralist, and a very intelligent and perceptive journalist. That is not Balzac, but is still very impressive indeed.” (p.1) This is typical of the East Coast critical establishment view of Wolfe. John Updike dismissed Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full as falling short of literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Norman Mailer’s review of the same book took a similar tack, as it was full of belittling questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” Yes, we can praise Wolfe a little bit, he does write well, but he crams all those status details into his writing, that can’t actually be literature! He’s too focused on what brand of shoes those are, and what store the end table came from! And so, Tom Wolfe, for all his astounding success, remained something of a literary outsider. I suspect that was probably just fine with Wolfe.
Ronald Weber’s 1974 essay, “Tom Wolfe’s Happiness Explosion,” is a very good essay on Wolfe’s early journalism. In the introduction to Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang, he described taking part in a symposium on “The Style of the Sixties.” The other panelists all seemed quite depressed about the state of the world, and they were open in their fears of incipient fascism, always the greatest fear of liberals. When it was Wolfe’s turn to speak, he said “What are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a…Happiness Explosion!” (The Pump House Gang, p.9) The other panelists didn’t have the foggiest notion what Wolfe was talking about. Wolfe’s point was that people had the time and money to engage in their chosen leisure activities.
Much of Wolfe’s early journalism was preoccupied with these new “statuspheres” as he called them—the custom-car scene in Southern California, teenagers living the surfing lifestyle, Hugh Hefner, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Weber’s essay is an excellent look at Wolfe’s early journalism, and the ways in which it broke from the conventional mold.
A. Carl Bredahl writes about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s a very good essay that is much easier to read. Bredahl writes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ attempts to start a new social order: “What was to have stimulated the individual to discover himself has become a social enterprise where the group is dependent on a leader.” (p.63-4) Bredahl understands the key fault of this enterprise, and why it ultimately ends up being doomed. It’s yet another search for a leader, a messiah who will lead you through the wilderness. It’s probably inevitable that any kind of new religion or way of thinking will start with a charismatic individual that is able to draw people to them, but ultimately, the new ideas will have to survive without the charismatic founder. It’s clear by the end of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that the Merry Pranksters are floundering without Kesey’s guidance, and they will be unable to make the leap to self-discovery.
In his essay, Bredahl sees the Pranksters’ unfinished movie of their cross-country bus trip as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together.” (p.68)
And that’s perhaps the difference between being “on the bus” and “off the bus.” To briefly explain the difference, those who are “on the bus” are a part of the psychedelic experience and have devoted themselves to Kesey’s ideas about a new society. Everyone else in society is “off the bus.” Those people who were “on the bus” were too close to the experience (and maybe too strung-out) to really make sense of it. Thus, it was left to Wolfe, who was definitely “off the bus,” to write the masterpiece of the psychedelic era, despite not being a Hippie himself.
Richard A. Kallan offers a rhetorical analysis of Wolfe’s writing. Kallan makes note of Wolfe’s many unusual writing habits, including idiosyncratic punctuation marks like the multiple colon, and multiple exclamation marks. Kallan’s thesis is that Wolfe was writing in an electronic style for the electronic age.
Wolfe’s writing style is unusual, even off-putting at the beginning. But he’s able to conjure up these visions that take you closer to the experience than a typical journalist would be able to. Kallan examines the beginning of “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe’s 1964 article about Baby Jane Holzer, a socialite who was that season’s “It Girl,” and who palled around with the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol. Wolfe begins the article with a long list of unpunctuated details as he observes the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert. You’re 34 words in before you even get a comma to catch your breath! Wolfe’s list of visual details throws you into the scene, whereas a more traditional writing style wouldn’t be as visceral or immediate. Wolfe was taking a bold gamble with his style, trying all sorts of different techniques “anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Wolfe’s style was brash—you’re either going to go with him on this journey, or you’re going to throw the magazine across the room and say “what in the hell is this guy talking about?” There’s no in between.
Ed Cohen’s subject is the two articles that Wolfe wrote about The New Yorker magazine in 1965, as the magazine was celebrating its’ 40th anniversary. These articles, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” were published in New York magazine, then the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune newspaper. They caused an enormous stir when they were first published, and they weren’t collected in one of Wolfe’s books until 2000, when they appeared in Hooking Up, his final essay collection.
Wolfe made fun of the New Yorker writing style, what he termed the “fact-gorged sentence,” and he also poked fun at William Shawn, the press-shy editor of the magazine from 1952 to 1987.
After Wolfe’s articles on The New Yorker appeared, numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to columnist Walter Lippmann, denounced him in print. Cultural critic and longtime New Yorker staffer Dwight Macdonald compared Wolfe to Hitler and Joe McCarthy. You know, because a newspaper reporter who also wrote for Esquire in his spare time was equivalent to a murderous dictator and a demagogic U.S. Senator. I’m sure Wolfe didn’t care much about what Macdonald thought of him, as Macdonald was another one of those elitist, arteriosclerotic old men taking up space at The New Yorker, preserving the august history of this important magazine forever in amber! Once again, we see how Wolfe annoyed the literary elite of the establishment.
And then, after 150 pages of reading other people’s writing about The Man in White, there he is! TW himself! He tells us all about “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”! The subtitle proclaims it to be “A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.” A social novel? What is he talking about? Doesn’t he know that social realism went out with John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell? First published in Harper’s magazine in November of 1989, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” spawned much criticism and controversy.
In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe essentially argued that American novelists should be, well, more like Tom Wolfe. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument. I suspect that most major novelists, if pressed on the point, would probably like most other novelists to be more like themselves. Wolfe made it clear in the essay that he had issues with the major literary styles of the past thirty years. The essay buttressed Wolfe’s reputation as an iconoclast, and again demonstrated how he didn’t fit in with the literary establishment.
Wolfe thought that American writers should tell us something about what it’s like to be alive in America right now. And he thought that the way to write such novels was to go out there and do some reporting. Ask questions! Interview people! For God’s sake, get out of your cloistered little study and TALK TO SOME PEOPLE, FER CRYING OUT LOUD!!! Of course, Wolfe had the journalistic background to easily do this, and each of Wolfe’s four novels grew out of his own reporting.
Wolfe didn’t understand why no one was writing about “this phenomenon that had played such a major part in American life in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: racial strife in the cities.” (p.153) Wolfe continues: “The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life.” (p.154) The novelists were turning inwards, to novels that illuminated the inner lives of their characters, but that did not engage with the social milieu surrounding them. Wolfe wrote of the Neo-Fabulist school of fiction: “The characters had no backgrounds. They came from nowhere. They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed indicated any class or ethnic origin.” (p.157) All of this was anathema to Wolfe. When he finally embarked on his long-awaited debut novel in the early 1980’s, he put his money where his mouth was and ventured out into the messy world of New York City to see what was happening for himself.
And the book that Wolfe came up with, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a hulking great hardcover, weighing in at nearly 700 pages. The Bonfire of the Vanities became a huge best-seller, thus proving to Wolfe that a good, old-fashioned social realist novel could still be successful.
Wolfe makes an excellent point in his essay about New Journalism outstripping the fiction of the time. If you examine the period from 1965 to 1975, what are some of the classic American books of those years? Some of them would surely be In Cold Blood, the Armies of the Night, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In short, New Journalism 101.
In the book’s final essay, Joshua J. Masters takes Wolfe to task for the racism he sees in The Bonfire of the Vanities. This was much commented on at the time of the book’s publication in 1987. A theme of the novel is the waning of white authority in the urban metropolis, and how minority groups are starting to flex their own power.
I’d argue that Wolfe’s racial vision of New York City in Bonfire is not necessarily how he himself sees things, but how his characters see things. The Bronx being characterized as a “jungle” might not be Tom Wolfe talking, but rather Sherman McCoy’s interpretation of the Bronx. It’s quite clear that Sherman has no knowledge of the Bronx, thus his imagination runs rampant.
Masters writes of Wolfe’s symbolic language describing the judicial system as consuming “meat.” Wolfe is blunt in his point that the judicial system is meant to devour the meat of whoever is in front of it. Yes, most of the time it’s the minorities who are being shoved into the meat-grinder, but now that Sherman is in the judicial system, it will greedily devour him too, despite the advantages of his race and privilege. Sherman becomes a cause celebre, and because of the rarity and novelty of someone like Sherman being processed through the judicial system, many people are crying out for him to be painfully wrung through the meat-grinder. For the District Attorney, Sherman becomes the “Great White Defendant” that he longs to take down.
Race was a theme in many of Wolfe’s writings, from Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers through all four of his novels. In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo in Time magazine, Wolfe replied to those critics who found Bonfire to be racist:
“What they are really saying is that I have violated a certain etiquette in literary circles that says you shouldn’t be altogether frank about these matters of ethnic and racial hostility. But if you raise the issue, a certain formula is to be followed: you must introduce a character, preferably from the streets, who is enlightened and shows everyone the error of his ways, so that by the time the story is over, everyone’s heading off wiser. There has to be a moral resolution. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.286)
Wolfe’s quote is exactly why I think he was such an excellent writer on race in America. Wolfe didn’t just mouth the usual liberal pieties about the subject, he tried to straightforwardly expose the important role race still plays in American society. And it took guts for a white Southerner from Virginia, who walked around in a WHITE SUIT, for crying out loud, to write about race in an honest way.
Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe features many interesting essays and viewpoints about the writing of Tom Wolfe. The book will inevitably bring you to reexamine the marvelous, stimulating, incandescent, phosphorescent, vibrant, bold, and colorful prose of Tom Wolfe.
There aren’t very many books about Tom Wolfe or his writing. One of the few is Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe, published by Chelsea House Publishers in 2001. The volume was edited by literary critic Harold Bloom, and it presents essays about Wolfe’s work that were published from 1974 to 1999.
Bloom’s introduction damns Wolfe with faint praise. “Wolfe is a grand entertainer, a true moralist, and a very intelligent and perceptive journalist. That is not Balzac, but is still very impressive indeed.” (p.1) This is typical of the East Coast critical establishment view of Wolfe. John Updike dismissed Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full as falling short of literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Norman Mailer’s review of the same book took a similar tack, as it was full of belittling questions like: “Is one encountering a major novel or a major best seller?” Yes, we can praise Wolfe a little bit, he does write well, but he crams all those status details into his writing, that can’t actually be literature! He’s too focused on what brand of shoes those are, and what store the end table came from! And so, Tom Wolfe, for all his astounding success, remained something of a literary outsider. I suspect that was probably just fine with Wolfe.
Ronald Weber’s 1974 essay, “Tom Wolfe’s Happiness Explosion,” is a very good essay on Wolfe’s early journalism. In the introduction to Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang, he described taking part in a symposium on “The Style of the Sixties.” The other panelists all seemed quite depressed about the state of the world, and they were open in their fears of incipient fascism, always the greatest fear of liberals. When it was Wolfe’s turn to speak, he said “What are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a…Happiness Explosion!” (The Pump House Gang, p.9) The other panelists didn’t have the foggiest notion what Wolfe was talking about. Wolfe’s point was that people had the time and money to engage in their chosen leisure activities.
Much of Wolfe’s early journalism was preoccupied with these new “statuspheres” as he called them—the custom-car scene in Southern California, teenagers living the surfing lifestyle, Hugh Hefner, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Weber’s essay is an excellent look at Wolfe’s early journalism, and the ways in which it broke from the conventional mold.
A. Carl Bredahl writes about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s a very good essay that is much easier to read. Bredahl writes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ attempts to start a new social order: “What was to have stimulated the individual to discover himself has become a social enterprise where the group is dependent on a leader.” (p.63-4) Bredahl understands the key fault of this enterprise, and why it ultimately ends up being doomed. It’s yet another search for a leader, a messiah who will lead you through the wilderness. It’s probably inevitable that any kind of new religion or way of thinking will start with a charismatic individual that is able to draw people to them, but ultimately, the new ideas will have to survive without the charismatic founder. It’s clear by the end of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that the Merry Pranksters are floundering without Kesey’s guidance, and they will be unable to make the leap to self-discovery.
In his essay, Bredahl sees the Pranksters’ unfinished movie of their cross-country bus trip as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together.” (p.68)
And that’s perhaps the difference between being “on the bus” and “off the bus.” To briefly explain the difference, those who are “on the bus” are a part of the psychedelic experience and have devoted themselves to Kesey’s ideas about a new society. Everyone else in society is “off the bus.” Those people who were “on the bus” were too close to the experience (and maybe too strung-out) to really make sense of it. Thus, it was left to Wolfe, who was definitely “off the bus,” to write the masterpiece of the psychedelic era, despite not being a Hippie himself.
Richard A. Kallan offers a rhetorical analysis of Wolfe’s writing. Kallan makes note of Wolfe’s many unusual writing habits, including idiosyncratic punctuation marks like the multiple colon, and multiple exclamation marks. Kallan’s thesis is that Wolfe was writing in an electronic style for the electronic age.
Wolfe’s writing style is unusual, even off-putting at the beginning. But he’s able to conjure up these visions that take you closer to the experience than a typical journalist would be able to. Kallan examines the beginning of “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe’s 1964 article about Baby Jane Holzer, a socialite who was that season’s “It Girl,” and who palled around with the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol. Wolfe begins the article with a long list of unpunctuated details as he observes the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert. You’re 34 words in before you even get a comma to catch your breath! Wolfe’s list of visual details throws you into the scene, whereas a more traditional writing style wouldn’t be as visceral or immediate. Wolfe was taking a bold gamble with his style, trying all sorts of different techniques “anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Wolfe’s style was brash—you’re either going to go with him on this journey, or you’re going to throw the magazine across the room and say “what in the hell is this guy talking about?” There’s no in between.
Ed Cohen’s subject is the two articles that Wolfe wrote about The New Yorker magazine in 1965, as the magazine was celebrating its’ 40th anniversary. These articles, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” were published in New York magazine, then the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune newspaper. They caused an enormous stir when they were first published, and they weren’t collected in one of Wolfe’s books until 2000, when they appeared in Hooking Up, his final essay collection.
Wolfe made fun of the New Yorker writing style, what he termed the “fact-gorged sentence,” and he also poked fun at William Shawn, the press-shy editor of the magazine from 1952 to 1987.
After Wolfe’s articles on The New Yorker appeared, numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to columnist Walter Lippmann, denounced him in print. Cultural critic and longtime New Yorker staffer Dwight Macdonald compared Wolfe to Hitler and Joe McCarthy. You know, because a newspaper reporter who also wrote for Esquire in his spare time was equivalent to a murderous dictator and a demagogic U.S. Senator. I’m sure Wolfe didn’t care much about what Macdonald thought of him, as Macdonald was another one of those elitist, arteriosclerotic old men taking up space at The New Yorker, preserving the august history of this important magazine forever in amber! Once again, we see how Wolfe annoyed the literary elite of the establishment.
And then, after 150 pages of reading other people’s writing about The Man in White, there he is! TW himself! He tells us all about “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”! The subtitle proclaims it to be “A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel.” A social novel? What is he talking about? Doesn’t he know that social realism went out with John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell? First published in Harper’s magazine in November of 1989, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” spawned much criticism and controversy.
In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe essentially argued that American novelists should be, well, more like Tom Wolfe. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument. I suspect that most major novelists, if pressed on the point, would probably like most other novelists to be more like themselves. Wolfe made it clear in the essay that he had issues with the major literary styles of the past thirty years. The essay buttressed Wolfe’s reputation as an iconoclast, and again demonstrated how he didn’t fit in with the literary establishment.
Wolfe thought that American writers should tell us something about what it’s like to be alive in America right now. And he thought that the way to write such novels was to go out there and do some reporting. Ask questions! Interview people! For God’s sake, get out of your cloistered little study and TALK TO SOME PEOPLE, FER CRYING OUT LOUD!!! Of course, Wolfe had the journalistic background to easily do this, and each of Wolfe’s four novels grew out of his own reporting.
Wolfe didn’t understand why no one was writing about “this phenomenon that had played such a major part in American life in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: racial strife in the cities.” (p.153) Wolfe continues: “The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life.” (p.154) The novelists were turning inwards, to novels that illuminated the inner lives of their characters, but that did not engage with the social milieu surrounding them. Wolfe wrote of the Neo-Fabulist school of fiction: “The characters had no backgrounds. They came from nowhere. They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed indicated any class or ethnic origin.” (p.157) All of this was anathema to Wolfe. When he finally embarked on his long-awaited debut novel in the early 1980’s, he put his money where his mouth was and ventured out into the messy world of New York City to see what was happening for himself.
And the book that Wolfe came up with, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was a hulking great hardcover, weighing in at nearly 700 pages. The Bonfire of the Vanities became a huge best-seller, thus proving to Wolfe that a good, old-fashioned social realist novel could still be successful.
Wolfe makes an excellent point in his essay about New Journalism outstripping the fiction of the time. If you examine the period from 1965 to 1975, what are some of the classic American books of those years? Some of them would surely be In Cold Blood, the Armies of the Night, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In short, New Journalism 101.
In the book’s final essay, Joshua J. Masters takes Wolfe to task for the racism he sees in The Bonfire of the Vanities. This was much commented on at the time of the book’s publication in 1987. A theme of the novel is the waning of white authority in the urban metropolis, and how minority groups are starting to flex their own power.
I’d argue that Wolfe’s racial vision of New York City in Bonfire is not necessarily how he himself sees things, but how his characters see things. The Bronx being characterized as a “jungle” might not be Tom Wolfe talking, but rather Sherman McCoy’s interpretation of the Bronx. It’s quite clear that Sherman has no knowledge of the Bronx, thus his imagination runs rampant.
Masters writes of Wolfe’s symbolic language describing the judicial system as consuming “meat.” Wolfe is blunt in his point that the judicial system is meant to devour the meat of whoever is in front of it. Yes, most of the time it’s the minorities who are being shoved into the meat-grinder, but now that Sherman is in the judicial system, it will greedily devour him too, despite the advantages of his race and privilege. Sherman becomes a cause celebre, and because of the rarity and novelty of someone like Sherman being processed through the judicial system, many people are crying out for him to be painfully wrung through the meat-grinder. For the District Attorney, Sherman becomes the “Great White Defendant” that he longs to take down.
Race was a theme in many of Wolfe’s writings, from Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers through all four of his novels. In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo in Time magazine, Wolfe replied to those critics who found Bonfire to be racist:
“What they are really saying is that I have violated a certain etiquette in literary circles that says you shouldn’t be altogether frank about these matters of ethnic and racial hostility. But if you raise the issue, a certain formula is to be followed: you must introduce a character, preferably from the streets, who is enlightened and shows everyone the error of his ways, so that by the time the story is over, everyone’s heading off wiser. There has to be a moral resolution. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.286)
Wolfe’s quote is exactly why I think he was such an excellent writer on race in America. Wolfe didn’t just mouth the usual liberal pieties about the subject, he tried to straightforwardly expose the important role race still plays in American society. And it took guts for a white Southerner from Virginia, who walked around in a WHITE SUIT, for crying out loud, to write about race in an honest way.
Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe features many interesting essays and viewpoints about the writing of Tom Wolfe. The book will inevitably bring you to reexamine the marvelous, stimulating, incandescent, phosphorescent, vibrant, bold, and colorful prose of Tom Wolfe.
Displaying 1 of 1 review