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11 unusual facts about Tom Wolfe


Acid Tests

He took the parties to public places, and advertised with posters that read, "CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST?", and the name was later popularized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

DC: The New Frontier

The storyline draws inspiration from the comic books and films of the period, as well as both the novel and film The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.

Mercury-Redstone 3

The Mercury-Redstone 3 mission was dramatized in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon episode "Can We Do This?" (starring Ted Levine as Alan Shepard), as well as in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, and Philip Kaufman's movie The Right Stuff based on the book.

Murray Kempton

He was known for his rococo style, so much so that in his collection Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe wrote that "Kempton used so many elegant British double and triple negatives, half the time you couldn’t figure out what he was saying."

Nicholas Tomalin

His article The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong was included in Tom Wolfe's collection The New Journalism, which was a collection of non-fiction pieces emblematic of a new movement of reporting aimed at revolutionising the field.

Paul R. McHugh

McHugh also treated author Tom Wolfe for depression suffered following coronary bypass surgery.

Santa Rita Jail

Major portions of Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998) take place at Santa Rita Jail, but the facility depicted in the novel was the pre-1989 jail which used World War II-era barrack-style buildings.

Sonja Merljak Zdovc

In 2004, she successfully defended her PhD thesis on Tom Wolfe's New Journalism in Slovenia and USA at the University of Ljubljana.

Sparta, North Carolina

Sparta was stated as the hometown of Charlotte Simmons in Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Sternocleidomastoid muscle

In Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Larry Kramer, a Bronx District Attorney and one of the novel's main protagonists, prides himself on his strong sternocleidomastoids, which he "fans out" in front of women to help give himself a more tough, masculine appearance.

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

It was later reprinted in Tom Wolfe's anthology The New Journalism (1973) and also in one of Thompson's own books The Great Shark Hunt (1979), a book collecting several of his earlier works.


Comics and Sequential Art

He refers to an article by Tom Wolfe in the Harvard Educational Review (August 1977), expanding the term "reading" to mean more than just "reading words".

Gonzo journalism

Gonzo journalism has now become a bona-fide style of writing that concerns itself with "telling it like it is", similar to the New Journalism of the 1960s, led primarily by Tom Wolfe and also championed by Lester Bangs, George Plimpton, Terry Southern, and John Birmingham—in fact, gonzo journalism is considered a sub-genre of new journalism.

Harold Hayes

As an editor, Hayes appreciated bold writing and points of view, favoring writers with a flair for ferreting out the spirit of the time—writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, John Sack, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Garry Wills, Gina Berriault, and Nora Ephron.

Lorraine Feather

She was also commissioned to write lyrics for a musical production of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (music by New York neo-classical composer Stefania de Kenessey).

Museum of Arts and Design

However, the museum's plans to radically alter the building's original design by Edward Durell Stone touched off a preservation battle joined by Tom Wolfe, Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Robert A. M. Stern, Columbia art history department chairman Barry Bergdoll, New York Times' architecture critics Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff, urbanist scholar Witold Rybczynski, among others.

Philip Kaufman

His movies have adapted novels of widely different types – from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun; from Tom Wolfe’s heroic epic The Right Stuff to the erotic writings of Anaïs Nin’s Henry & June.

Seymour Krim

His deepest foray into daily journalism began in 1965 when he joined the New York Herald Tribune′s staff which included Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap.

Susan Zakin

Coyotes and Town Dogs is a history of the U.S. conservation movement since Earth Day 1970, written in the New Journalism style of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

The Last American Hero

The film is based on Tom Wolfe's story, "The Last American Hero", which is included in his 1965 debut collection of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

The Someday Funnies

Pieces were created especially for the book by writers, artists, and composers including the writer William Burroughs, the filmmaker Federico Fellini, the writer Tom Wolfe, the musician Frank Zappa, the cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist Gahan Wilson, the artist Red Grooms, and 160 others.