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It takes a special kind of audacity to write an essay exhorting people to write like you.
But that was Tom Wolfe.
Although he was no pup when his career started to catch fire his breakthrough piece There Goes (Varoom!
That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!)
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!)
But time caught up with him eventually.
Time has a way of making fuddy-duddies of every writer.
Its humbling, in its way.
), even multiple exclamation points (!!!!!!
Dobell stripped Dear Byron off the top and published it.
Yes!, an elegiac look at stock-car racer Junior Johnson that was eventually adapted intoa Jeff Bridges movie.
Social X-Ray described the emaciated, plastic-surgery-sculpted society women that populate the upper echelons of the worlds cities.
His penultimate novel, 2004sI Am Charlotte Simmons, was similarly irksome.
Reviewing the book forNew York, Cristina Nehring called Wolfes view of youthful eroticism dark and rotten.
And with age comes disbelief; with age comes a kind of pessimism.
The capacity for wonder is the elixir of youth.
Thats not true with nonfiction.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Art is a creed, not a craft.
Wolfe forgot a staggering amount of great writing, and the best of it is ageless.
