The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe's final book, was about language. Apes can communicate, Darwin noticed, so can dolphins. Does that make them like us? According to Wolfe, the answer isn't just no, but, as he would put it, noooooooo!!!!! What makes humans unique is our invention of language. Wolfe himself was unique as a writer for how he handled language, giving it sound effects, explosive charge, and the illusion of improvisation. No one else sounded quite like him or had the inclination to poke a walking stick into the sacred cultural beehives he did. Belonging to a group—or starting one—wasn't his thing. He was, as his last name implied, a lone species.
Tom Wolfe died on Monday in New York City at the age of 88. Where else could such a true iconoclast find a lasting home than in the pages of Esquire, a magazine of upstarts, pranksters, and literary scoundrels? Beginning in 1963 (and lasting over two decades), Wolfe contributed a slew of essays, reportage, and fiction to our pages.
Included here are an obituary, a list of his essential books, an essay about his writing style, and two pieces that Wolfe wrote for Esquire. One is a 1972 essay that charts the astonishing rise of New Journalism (and the backlash). The other, a profile of Muhammad Ali, is an example of what Wolfe could do when he first began to break free from the stultifying norms of mid-twentieth-century magazine writing. The novel as the end-all be-all of literary accomplishment was waning; real life had somehow become too big and chaotic for fiction to contain. Steeped in the tricks of the fiction trade, but trained as a newspaper journalist, Wolfe, who never seemed to forget that all humans are just glorified apes, stumbled upon a new tool. The result—fact-based pieces crafted into yarns of riveting drama—changed the trajectory of journalism.
—Jay Fielden, Esquire Editor-in-Chief |
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