You only had to look at him… or read such books as <i>The Bonfire of the Vanities </i>and <i>The Right Stuff </i>to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other
- John Pye, The Scotsman
Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence
- Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph
Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction… a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory
- Andy Martin, Independent
[Tom Wolfe’s] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists
Guardian
[Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don’t like fun
- Freddy Gray, The Catholic Herald
Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction.
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph