Using techniques usually reserved for fiction, he was among the first to question and consequently expand the boundaries of traditional journalism. While writing for magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and the New York Magazine, Wolfe found a whole new, unique approach to the popular form of the feature story. His editor Clay Felker recognized and encouraged the young reporter’s increasingly idiosyncratic techniques and kept him busy with creative assignments on diverse subjects. Starting at the bottom of the trade, Wolfe had already earned his spurs after four years and landed a job at the New York Herald Tribune in 1962. First employments led him to Washington and, as a correspondent for the Washington Post, to Cuba, where he covered the revolution in 1959. Wolfe received his PhD in 1957, but instead of accepting a teaching job in academia, he started working as a journalist right away, following in the footsteps of his idols Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. When the New York Giants refused him after three days of tryouts, he enrolled in Yale University’s American Studies doctoral program. Playing in a semi-professional league for one year, the twenty-year-old Virginian nourished dreams of earning his living as an athlete. Instead of further pursuing his studies or applying as a journalist, he decided to pursue a professional career in baseball. Born on Main Richmond, Virginia, the son of an agronomy professor and a landscape designer discovered his enthusiasm for fiction and journalism even before high school and majored in English at Washington and Lee in 1951. Since the beginning of his success as a creative force within the New Journalism movement in the late 1960s, Tom Wolfe has established himself as a major figure of American Letters.
“I’m not talking about zeitgeist now, or spiritual matters or other things people tend to talk about when they are talking about literary matters To me, it was always the technique that was important.” 1
Stylistic Analysis of Selected ChaptersĤ.4. Wolfe’s Call for Realism in Novel WritingĤ. Development of the Colloquial in American Fiction up to WolfeĢ. Tom Wolfe’s TheBonfire of the Vanities as a Stylistic Triumphġ.
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