Tom Wolfe Biography

One of the most popular and audacious journalists/authors of our age, Tom Wolfe heralded the ‘New Journalism’ movement, which broke the conventions and restrictions on journalistic writing. His unique and fresh style of writing suited the popular magazines including Harper's, Esquire, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. He has also been credited for coining certain words/phrases such as ‘statusphere,’ ‘the right stuff,’ ‘radical chic,’ ‘the Me Decade,’ and ‘social x-ray’, which have become a part of English vocabulary. His influence, especially in the world of printed media, is massive and not only he taught writers to exercise a certain degree of independence, but also introduced the usage of present tense while writing profile articles. Later, he wrote novels which were commercially successful but many of the mainstream writers severely criticized his writings owing to the approach he adopted in his literary works. Even today, disagreements between him and writers such as John Updike, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Irving are common in the public eye. Nonetheless, he remains one of the greatest journalists of the present day, who showed a new technique and offered a new insight into journalism, which also dealt with analysis and evaluation of facts.