Tom Wolfe Timeline
1931: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. born in Richmond, VA, on March 2. Wolfe later attends Washington and Lee University (BA, English, 1951), and Yale University (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957).
1956: Wolfe begins working as a reporter in Springfield, MA, Washington, D.C., then finally New York City, writing feature articles for major newspapers, as well as New York and Esquire magazines. Not satisfied with the conventions of newspaper reporting at the time, Wolfe experiments with using the techniques of fiction writing in his news articles. Wolfe's newspaper career spans a decade.
1963: After being sent by Esquire to research a story about the custom car world in Southern California, Wolfe returns to New York with ideas, but no article. Upon telling his editor he cannot write it, the editor suggests he send his notes and someone else will. Wolfe stays up all night, types 49 pages, and turns it in the next morning. Later that day, the editor calls to tell Wolfe they are cutting the salutation off the top of the memorandum, printing the rest as-is. Thus, New Journalism was arguably born, whereby writing and storytelling techniques previously utilized only in fiction were radically applied to nonfiction. Straight reporting pieces now were free to include: the author's perceptions and experience, shifting perspectives, the use of jargon and slang, the reconstruction of events and conversations.
1965: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux publish Wolfe's first collection of nonfiction stories displaying his newfound reporting techniques: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The book cements Wolfe's place as a prominent stylist of the New Journalism movement.
1968: The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (No. 91 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century) publish on the same day, and together provide an up-close portrait and exploration of the hippie culture of the 1960s (by following the novelist Ken Kesey and his entourage of LSD enthusiasts), and the cultural change occurring at a seminal point in U.S. social history.
1970: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is published. This collection underscores racial divide in America, including an am using story about the socialites of New York City seeking out black liberation groups as guests, focusing on the conductor Leonard Bernstein's party with the Black Panthers in attendance at his Park Avenue duplex. (No. 35 on National Review's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century .)
1976: Wolfe labels the 1970s "The Me Decade" in his collection of essays, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. Wolfe illustrates the bookthroughout.
1979: The Right Stuff is published. Depicting the status, structure, exploits, and ethics of daredevil pilots at the forefront of rocket and aircraft technology, as well as the beginnings of the space program and the pioneering NASA astronauts who were the first Americans to land on the moon, the book receives the National Book Award in 1980. An Academy Award-winning film is made from the book in 1983.
1987: With publication of his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities--serialized in Rolling Stone magazine--Wolfe pens one of the bestselling and definitive novels of the 1980s, continuing his social criticism and ability to capture the lives and preoccupations of Americans, one generation at a time. Wolfe receives a record $5 million for movie rights to the novel and, despite the success of the book, the film fails at the box office.
1998: A Man in Full, Wolfe's second novel, is published to mixed criticism, yet garners favor as a 1998 National Book Award Finalist. Here, Wolfe aims his sights on the Atlanta, GA, elite, trophy wives, and real estate developers, continuing to comment on racial issues and the chasm in socioeconomic status in America.
2000: Hooking Up, a collection of essays, reviews, profiles, and the novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, is published.
2004: On November 9, Wolfe's third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, set at the fictional Dupont University, is published.
Book Description
Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot-on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning--or the lack of it--amid today's American colleges.
Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different--and the exotic allure of her own innocence.
With his trademark satirical wit and famously sharp eye for telling detail, Wolfe draws on extensive observations at campuses across the country to immortalize the early-21st-century college-going experience.
Download Description
America's "peerless observer" (People) uncovers college life--from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating--plus race, class, sex, and basketball.
Customer Reviews:
Terrible.......2007-10-09
This is one of the worst books I've ever read. I was so disappointed. Having recently graduated from college I expected to identify with or at least recognize some of the experiences depicted in the novel. Nope! Everything was generalized or exploited to the point that it becomes a not very flattering caricature of college life. Don't bother with this one.
So bad that I burned it!.......2007-09-25
I am not even going to waste the time to get into the details of this book. It was such a horrible let down and insulting piece of work. I finished reading it while at a bon-fire, and I just tossed it in.
A sorry effort .......2007-08-25
"I Am Charlotte Simmons "by Tom Wolfe is another of that author's attempts to revive the Dickens/Anthony Trollope social novel, a college comedy, of sorts, where the bright but sheltered title character arrives at a modern college where the ways of the student body is anything but academic. "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is only the latest in Tom Wolfe's failing attempts to assert his relevance in American literature as a novelist. It's a lost cause, really, because the very talent that made his non-fiction work, for the most part, such wonderfully acidic and last portraits of a consumer culture is the same things that make his fiction elephantine bores. Supreme inspection of ticks and toilet can elevate personality pieces to the stage of writing art, but it produces flat characters, static situations, and rather desperate stretches of over writing to compensate for undeniable inertia. Wolfe seems to want to assume the position of the late William Gaddis in being America's greatest comic social novelist, but the distinction between the two writers is crucial; Gaddis was a virtuoso with language, dialogue and character, and was more than able to make use of copious research in his fiction in ways that made his fiction's famous complexity actually worth sussing through. Gaddis'" The Recognitions" is precisely the complex New York comic novel of art, commerce, greed and religion that Wolfe is incapable of writing Wolfe lost his punch years ago, producing two-dimensional doorstoppers as novels and angry-dog rants as essays in his most recent efforts, and Simmons has the kind of over-writing found in once-hip writers trying to establish their relevance. He sounds shrill and angry here. Wolfe insists that he's culturally conservative, yet isn't ready to make like John Dos Passos and tone down his writing; something in him desires to remain "edgy", or at least wants to be thought of as beings so. On the one hand he produces literary manifestos denouncing academic and experimental novelists who've forsaken their calling to produce moral fiction, and on the other he produces ham-handed vulgarity under the guise of satire with I Am Charlotte Simmons. He seems unaware that his novels are as bad as Brett Easton Ellis's, and his rationale for writing fiction the way he does is just as thin.
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Sounds right to me!.......2007-08-18
I'll say two things about this novel. First, I've read some reviews where the reviewer accuses Wolfe of going "over the top" with his description of college life at Dupont. Anyone who sees this as "over the top," clearly didn't attend a private college in the South. His description of college life is right on the mark.
Secondly, Wolfe does an incredible job of truly getting into the mind of an 18-year-old bumpkin. For that matter, he does an excellent job of getting into the mind of pretty much all of his main characters: Charlotte, shocked and appalled by the debauchery she witnesses yet utterly falling for the cool frat guy. He nails the elitist attitude Hoyt Thorpe has, truly getting inside his head and thinking thoughts a guy like Thorpe would believe, yet keep to himself with a smirk - just knowing he has it all figured out. The same can be said for his relaying of the simple-minded thoughts by JoJo Johanssen, as well as the pented up nerd-rage of an psuedo-intellectual like Adam Gellin.
What made me like this novel, was that I hated the ending. Sound strange? Well to be truthful, I must admit that I liked Charlotte much better when she was naive. Its hard to like the person that she becomes at the end. She never tells her mother, best friend, or mentor the truth. She realizes that she isn't so much an intellectual with a thirst for knowledge as she's just someone who wants to be recognized as more special than the next person. Shame on you, Charlotte.
A positive view amongst all the rampant cynicism.......2007-08-18
I bought "I Am Charlotte Simmons" as soon as it came out, and have read it multiple times since then. I was shocked to see how cynical everyone has been in reviewing this work of Wolfe's, as my opinion is quite the opposite. I think he nailed a lot of things right on.
I am not sure that him being 74 precludes him from being able to understand college kids today. Everyone is crying about "OH! But college kids are so much more mature and complex than Wolfe alludes to here. He is missing the mark completely and is stating the obvious." Wrong! College kids go through the same struggles over and over, even if they manifest in different ways. It is a rite of passage, just as being in the Army or anything else at 18 years of age. Everyone has their own experience, but overall they are not special - just to that individual.
I attended college from 2001-2007 and see many parallels at my school that Wolfe stated about Dupont. The truth of the matter is, people inflate themselves with self-importance and this supposed maturity. Oh, to be a grown up and in college now! The bacchanals coexist with the decent grades and the SAT scores and involvement. Sex, alcohol, and as Laurie as much said - you can experiment and everyone just FORGETS after you are out of college. Everyone must forget how simpleminded it all was after they leave, as well. I didn't. Wolfe stated the obvious, because it IS obvious. Being a Charlotte Simmons prototype myself, I saw a lot of my innocence stripped away as much as I saw my world visions come alive. I, too, strove for a life of the mind and for that mysterious cenacle. None of this is unique or different, but we all think we are special when we are going through it.
As a 23 year old senior who had gone through military commitments and other character-building events, I saw freshmen classes come in and do the same things I did. It never changes. It's always about experimentation, even if people lose their virginity in junior high or get 'wasted' before they are sophomores. College presents this...new opportunity.
One reviewer was concerned that Wolfe drew too many strong parallels. Innocent country girl? Snobby, rich roommate? Fratty? Dumb Jock? Of course exceptions exist, but writing about all the exceptions would have made the book over 1,000 pages long. There are still very sheltered people in the world just as there are 16 year old cosmopolitans and one cannot assume that Wolfe was being too fanciful about his study and too...naive.
The book will not revolutionize your mind - you may have already had the same observations about college as Wolfe did. But his mastery of the English language and craftsmanship will definitely put your quest for a 'life of the mind' on the right track.
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In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe masterfully chronicles college sports, fraternities, keggers, coeds, and sex--all through the eyes of the titular Simmons, a bright and beautiful freshman at the fictional Dupont University. Listen to an Amazon.com exclusive audio clip of Wolfe talking about his new novel.