Primary Job Title journalist and author Primary Organization 
Picador
Location United States, North America Gender Male
Website www.tomwolfe.com/
Tom Wolfe is an American author and journalist, who is known for his association and influence over the New Journalism literary movement in which literary techniques are used in objective even-handed journalism. In December 1956, Tom Wolfe took a job as a reporter on the Springfield Union. It was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most
of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post’s Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild’s foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.
In 1962, Tom Wolfe became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, while still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
In 1968, Tom Wolfe published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a non-fiction story of the hippie era. In 1970, he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. In 1975, he published another book on the American art world, The Painted Word.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe published a collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." In 1979, he completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post-World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. In 1984 and 1985, he wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987.
In 2000, Tom Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and non-fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled Hooking Up. It included Ambush at Fort Bragg and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets."
Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington, Lee, and Yale universities. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.
