Fiction, history, and journalism are separate heavyweight divisions of American literature, with their own champions. Tom Wolfe, who has died aged 88, was remarkable for having been a superstar in all three.
But Wolfe also united the belts by freely importing moves and punches from one discipline into the others. His fiction was reportorial, his factual writing novelistic, and his journalism cinematic and theatrical.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) is a key modern American novel, depicting the ruinous gulf, in Reaganite America and other subsequent democracies, between the upper heights of super-wealth and the lower depths of normality.
The Right Stuff (1979), an oral history of the American space programme, is a model of recent historical writing that remains the basis for all future attempts at the story.
And The New Journalism (1973), with Wolfe as key contributor and co-editor, established a style of news reporting that, rather than neutrally marshalling facts and quotes, told the story in the linguistic equivalent of movie sound-effects and firecracker dialogue, achieved not so much through interviewing sources as stalking them over a prolonged period.
It was equally typical of his career that Wolfe should have become involved in a spectacular public feud with perhaps the only other US author to challenge him for the generic triple crown, Norman Mailer (1923-2007).
In 1989 Wolfe published an article, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, in which he implied that The Bonfire of the Vanities, his first novel, was effectively superior to the combined output of near-contemporaries such as Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. Wolfe contended that the others contemplated their own intellects and genitals, while he reported back from the real, teeming world. The dismissed pulled on their gloves in reviews and interviews and took aim at Wolfe’s second – and undoubtedly inferior – novel, A Man in Full (1998).
The trio of rivals whom Wolfe called “the three stooges” were only a fraction of his enemies. As a Republican dandy, he infuriated, at various times, critics and contemporaries who were liberal, feminist or macho.
A particular goad to many was that the writer not only liked to start spats but to wear them. These antique ankle-protectors and a silver-topped cane often complemented the white suits he always wore in public. He was a Wolfe in fop’s clothing.
But this perception that an author would benefit from instant recognisability – making him famous enough to twice feature on The Simpsons – showed his sophisticated understanding of modern culture. His manipulation of image has been as influential on subsequent literary generations as his blurring of the lines between fact, fiction and journalism, which is now a standard literary tactic.
In both writing and wardrobe, Tom Wolfe had a phenomenal sense of style.
