Tom Wolfe, who died yesterday, was a master of a delirious, rococo prose style, an elaborately, self-created, virtuoso journalist and author with a rarely-paralleled instinct for storytelling, who chronicled the transformation of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s by creating a stylised voice that signaled and reflected its time.
Wolfe’s innovation was to write nonfiction in a singular voice and in a similar vein to fiction, with scenes, dialogue and atmosphere, injecting ambiance into description, tone into conversation and backgrounds and settings into narrative. These literary techniques – introduced to journalism by Wolfe and many others were – at the time, revolutionary – a journalistic parallel to the deep societal shifts occurring in the United States.
What was unusual is that these pieces were intended to provoke feeling. This was not journalism aspiring to the veracity through resolute pursuit of an empirical truth, it was journalism through immersion, vivid characterisation and an array of irregular perspectives.
Crucially, Wolfe and his fellow practitioners — including Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Lillian Ross, Gay Talese, Richard Ben Cramer – sought to disintermediate prose, to play with it, re-imagine it, conjuring together, dense, byzantine sentences and unconventional punctuation that delivered a zesty wallop to the reader.
It seems strange to consider this now, but there was once a time, not so long ago, when the publication of a novel could dominate the culture in the way that, say, Michael Wolff’s account of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, did earlier this year. But, in 1987, on the publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities, a sprawling, soaring, grand satire of eighties New York, centred on the American preoccupations of race, money and ambition, it was said that Wolfe had a singular subject matter: status.
And this fascination with transformation and invention – of the self and the larger mechanisms of society – are what always seemed to mark out the subjects Wolfe chose to cover, be that the Black Panthers, Ken Casey or Chuck Yeager and the Mercury programme. Wolfe was interested in those that were at the centre of change. He wrote about Robert Noyce, the so-called Mayor of Silicon Valley, advances in neuroscience and the American space programme. Here, he profiles Marshall McLuhan in the New York Herald Tribune in 1965.
Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in the business of moving information. Quite as much as A. T.&T. Yes. Of-course-I-am-willing-to-be-patient. He pulls his chin down into his neck and looks up out of his ion' Scotch-lairdly face. Yes. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message as it were. Yes. Light is a self-contained communications system in which the medium is the message. Just think that over for a moment – I-am-willing-to-be – When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines –
– but that it was in the business
of processing
information,
then it began
to navigate
with
clear
vision.
Yes.
Swell! But where did this guy come from? What is this – cryptic, Delphian saying: The electric light is pure information.
Delphic! The medium is the message. We are moving out of the age of the visual into the age of the aural and tactile...
He wrote with heart, flair and with linguistic imagination and always documented what he saw in technicolour. He leaves behind an enduring body of nonfiction, one grand novel, a hundred and ninety boxes of notebooks, manuscripts, tailors’ bills and postcards purchased by the New York Library in 2013, and a singular, distinctive, elevated voice.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
