In his 1979 blockbuster, The Right Stuff, Wolfe did not inject himself into the narrative.
Wolfe still maintained his fidelity to realism, citing John Steinbeck and Edith Wharton as examples. By the mid-1980s, he launched an attack on literary fiction, decrying the existence of too many novels about the novelists and their anxieties-get out of the house and explore America. In the “New Journalism,” the author often became as much a part of the story as the events he wrote about. Journalism, Wolfe maintained, was the only way to achieve that goal. Who was that dandy in the white suit? Don’t people know how hot it gets in Richmond, VA, Wolfe’s hometown, during the summer months? In the 1960s, Wolfe began preaching the gospel of “New Journalism.” Literature must be about realism. Ammons could fill a lecture hall.Īmong the greats of that bountiful decade was ever-popular Tom Wolfe. Poetry wasn’t quite as strong especially after the passing of America’s most natural poet, Robert Lowell, in 1977, but James Dickey, Richard Wilbur and the unjustly-forgotten A.M. A typically sweeping statement, but if so, America was doing pretty well during the 1970s: Novelists like John Updike, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Walker Percy, to name only a few, defined the contours of fiction.
Tom Wolfe hits his stride with Project Mercury masterpiece The Mercury Seven, front row, from left: Walter Schirra, Donald Slayton, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter back row: Alan Shepard, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom and Gordon Cooper (Photo by NASA)Įzra Pound once claimed that you can judge a nation by its literature.
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