The Right Stuff – Tom Wolf who Coined the Me Decade Dies at 88
Best selling author and genre breaking journalist dies at 88. (NPR obit)
Louis Menand (New Yorker) Tom Wolf, Sage of Status Anxiety
Satire associates aspiration with fatuousness and newness with faddishness, and Tom Wolfe was skilled at making those reductions.
Satire is highbrow populism. (Hence Wolfe’s diatribes against modernist art and architecture.)
Philip Kaufman, the San Francisco filmmaker who directed the adaptation of “The Right Stuff,” also wrote the screenplay for the 1983 film.
“The book was such a great piece of writing that in a way it could not be put into a film,” Kaufman said. “He was going for a spirit of something that maybe all people have in common. That ineffable quality that can’t even be mentioned. It took me five years to make the movie.
“Tom saw it at a private screening,” Kaufman added. “There is a scene where Sam Shepard (as Chuck Yeager) is arriving by horseback in the high desert like a cowboy in a leather jacket. He sees this small test airplane sitting alone in the desert being fueled. Everyone who has tried to ride this plane has died, and now he is looking at this plane, the bronc that can’t be broken. It is, in a way, the meeting of the Western in the movies with the future.
“When Tom saw this he just started applauding, I am told. When the movie was over, he asked if he could see it again right now, all the way through. He loved it.”
(Pictured in 1996 with the writer Hunter S Thompson at the 25th anniversary party of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
Tom W on Hunter (Youtube)
Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick, a teacher of American studies, educated at Yale. More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his students to look at the whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane.[citation needed] Wolfe’s undergraduate thesis, entitled “A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America,” evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951.
Astronaut Scott Kelly to Tom Wolf (Vanity Fair)