Too many commentators, when writing about Tom Wolfe, attempt to parody his style. Zowie! Bam! Hrrrrmph!!!! And by failing, they all inadvertently showed why Wolfe was Wolfe. (On principle and also out of self-preservation, I won’t even try it.) The only critic who came close to matching him at the sentence-by-sentence level was Kurt Vonnegut, reviewing Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, for the New York Times in 1965. He himself noted that Wolfe pastiche invariably misses the mark, and he closed his (mostly warm) review with a one-sentence paragraph:

There does not yet exist a book-length biography of Wolfe (although one is most assuredly on the way from someone, and one suspects it’ll be a thousand-pager). Till then there is Radical Wolfe, a documentary directed by Richard Dewey and released last year, adapted from a Michael Lewis profile of the Man in the White Suit himself, published in Vanity Fair about two and a half years before Wolfe’s death in 2018. But if you want to read a lot about Tom Wolfe, the best thing to read, for now at least, is a lot of Tom Wolfe.

He arrived on the national scene at Esquire, where he published his first big magazine pieces — notably his celebrated analytical celebration of California’s car customizers — but you can really see his development as a writer in our pages. Starting in 1963, when New York was still a supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, he wrote about teen culture, about one of the first topless dancers with silicone-enhanced breasts, about Baby Jane Holzer, about Pop Art collectors, about the embalmed self-satisfaction of The New Yorker, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Class and status in America were his favorite subject of analysis, preferably if he could take a few shots at voguish liberals along the way.

By 1967, after the Trib and its short-lived successor had folded, he was one of the highest-profile journalists going, and his editor, Clay Felker, began bringing Wolfe — along with their friend and future colleague Gloria Steinem — to lunches with potential investors, trying to cadge some financing to take the publication out on its own. Steinem called these sessions “tap-dancing for rich people,” and the mix of her cool glamour and Wolfe’s courtliness — not to mention that each of them had charm to spare — played well. Felker’s magazine launched on April Fool’s Day 1968, with stories by Wolfe and Steinem teased on the cover.

He wrote steadily for New York in those first couple of years, then slowed down to contribute fewer longer pieces. (Probably owing to both literary ambition and procrastination: Despite his newspaper background, Wolfe sometimes found it difficult to get a piece of writing going, and often pushed his editors’ deadlines.) Readers often describe his language in these stories as pyrotechnic, and it certainly makes you ooh and aah the way fireworks do, but I think of it as pyrolytic: applying extreme heat and often reducing his subjects to ash.

Wolfe stayed loyal to his editors, and when Felker was deposed in a hostile takeover at the beginning of 1977, he, too, left New York in solidarity. The bulk of his magazine work thereafter was for Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, and he eventually shifted to writing mostly novels. But he did not entirely vanish from our orbit. In later years, he contributed a few short pieces and a couple of longer ones to New York, including a majestic remembrance of Felker in 2008 and a sweet appreciation of the late photographer Marie Cosindas in 2017. The latter appears to have been his final published work.

But let’s start at the beginning. Here, in one piece, is that double-size story from our first two issues, cover-dated April 8 and 15, 1968: “You and Your Big Mouth: How the Honks and Wonks Reveal the Phonetic Truth about Status” and “Dah-Ling! Your Honk Is Slipping!” As one of those New York wonks might put it: I got the good stuff for ya right here, yaknowwhatImean?

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