In Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel A Man In Full, big-time real estate developer Charlie Croker becomes a religious evangelical as his once-vast wealth dissolves. The same thing seems to be happening to Bear Stearns chairman and former CEO James Cayne, who played golf and bridge and maybe smoked pot as his firm crumbled, and…
"At EAT on Upper East Side. Tom Wolff is sitting by himself eating breakfast in the window. Wearing full white suit." Sometimes, even when you do get a $7 million advance on your next book about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami," you still end up seated near the damn window,…
The white-suited Tom Wolfe is one of the original pioneers of New Journalism, a movement in the 1960s that merged literary techniques with reportage.
If anybody still believes the book publishing industry remains a cultural haven in this numbers-obsessed era, this should shatter their illusions. In Motoko Rich's article on Tom Wolfe's new book deal, there's a hugely compromising nugget of data. I am Charlotte Simmons, the dapper author's most recent blockbuster,…
Tom Wolfe's next book, "Back to Blood," will be published by Little, Brown in 2009. (Not Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the firm he's been with for 40 years!) The book covers Wolfe's usual bases: "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived…
Happy 20th birthday, 'Bonfire of the Vanities'! Today, the Times celebrates Tom Wolfe's novel with a look at the ways New York has changed since 1987—it's full of rich white people now, did you know?—and interviews with some of the people who characters in the book were based on, or who knew those people. The…
Since time immemorial, or since maybe 2004, we have received missives from a person called The Earl Grey. As frequently as possible, we print these letters as a service to society.
The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual…
We can understand how, in the manic rush to deliver your premier issue to a waiting public and get your website up to snuff, certain details can be overlooked. Still, shouldn't someone at Conde Nast thought to have spent $7.95 from their $125 million endowment to snap up portfoliomag.com? Because this does not exactly…
Let us begin with the cover of Portfolio. It's a gilded city image, a metropolis of lit-up office windows in earth tones, oddly, as it is supposed to be an homage to Berenice Abbott. (A funny reference, as she was told that New York City was too toxic for her to live in and so she left.) Publisher David Carey and…
When he's not defending the architectural sanctity of the Upper East Side, Tom Wolfe wears white suits. It's his gimmick, his thing, like Paris Hilton's vagina or Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism. Whether or not you subscribe to the "enduring appeal" of the white suit, we nevertheless require your assistance. We hate to…
This morning we asked you to help us identify the mystery journalist who had the effrontery to start his own website in the early days of the Internet. While the general consensus remains fixated on Andrew Sullivan, there are a few other ideas out there. We present them after the jump.
If you hadn't read the Automobiles section — which, in fact, we usually don't, and we have no idea what possessed us to do so this week — you'd have missed this delightfully jarring bit:
Remember Doctor Rammer Doc Doc? No? Then you must not've read Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full, which featured the improbably named rapper's threat to "peel yo cap."
· Alec Baldwin, Rosie Perez, Molly Shannon, and Liev Schreiber read some Christmas stories written by funnyman David Sedaris at Studio 54 tonight. Kind of like the Oceans 12 of staged readings, but without the A-listers. And don't scoff at the $25 ticket price, Grinch—all the proceeds go to charity. [Filmmaker Magazine
Not that you wanted to know this, but apparently Tom Wolfe has won some sort of award for bad sex. Writing about sex badly, that is.
Today's Page Six reports that Tom Wolfe's daughter, 24 year-old Alexandra (or Charlotte Simmons, as most like to call her), has signed a deal with Broadway Books to pen American Coddle. The book is based on her Observer article about children being—you guessed it—coddled by their parents. If she gets this thing to the…
A Gawker manservant sends this delightfully obscure camera phone picture of novelist Tom Wolfe (indicated by "white suit"), taken at JFK airport last night:
Lest you think the Times Op-Ed page is devoid of fiction (guffaw!), columnist David Brooks deigns to review Tom Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. In fact, he even tells us HOW to review Wolfe, just in case you want to do it yourself:
