Tom Wolfe Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
  2. A Man in Full (1998)
  3. I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004)
  4. Back to Blood (2012)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Hooking Up (1989)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. In Our Time (1961)
  2. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)
  3. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
  4. The Pump House Gang (1968)
  5. Radical Chic: And, Mau Mauing The Flak Catchers (1970)
  6. The New Journalism (1973)
  7. The Painted Word (1975)
  8. Mauve Gloves and Madman, Clutter and Vine (1977)
  9. The Right Stuff (1979)
  10. From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)
  11. The Purple Decades (1982)
  12. The Kingdom of Speech (2016)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Tom Wolfe Books Overview

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Vintage Tom Wolfe, the 1 bestseller that will forever define late twentieth century New York style. ‘No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton’ The National Review Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City. Tom Wolfe’s first novel remains a definitive work of American fiction after more than twenty years in print. It looks at the greed and racism on New York City’s underbelly in the 1980s through the eyes of four fictional individuals, composites of characteristics that Wolfe observed in society. The Bonfire of the Vanities represents Wolfe’s appreciation for minute and surprising details of American culture. ‘A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won’t let you go.’ The New York Times Book Review’A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right.’ The Washington Post Book World’Nasty, satirical, probing, and dead on accurate…
Wolfe falls so naturally into this colorful, supercharged account of New York high life and low life that it’s hard to believe he hasn’t been writing fiction all life…
It also reads at a veritable gallop those pages flash by you as you watch, with fascinated horror, the meticulously charted fall of Sherman McCoy.’ The Seattle Times’The Bonfire of the Vanities chronicles the collapse of a Wall Street bond trader, and examines a world in which fortunes are made and lost at the blink of a computer screen…
Wolfe’s subject couldn’t be more topical: New Yorkers’ relentless pursuit and flaunting of wealth, and the fury it evokes in the have nots.’ USA Today’Touches passionately on perennial themes that will give it staying power…
Bonfire is news that will stay news because a century hence readers will find preserved in it the strong flavor of some unfortunately important slices of life in our time.’ George F. Will

A Man in Full

A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. Now the master is back with a pitch perfect coast to coast portrait of our wild and wooly, no holds barred, multifarious country on the cusp of the millennium. The setting is Atlanta, Georgia a racially mixed, late century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late middle aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half empty office complex with a staggering load of debt. Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system. And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek ‘the Canon’ Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky high. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most admired novelist. Charlie Croker’s deliverance from his tribulations provides an unforgettable denouement to the most widely awaited, hilarious and telling novel America has seen in ages Tom Wolfe’s most outstanding achievement to date.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning or the lack of it amid today’s American colleges. Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship housing the cream of America’s youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition…
Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper crust coeds of Dupont, sex, cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont’s privileged elite her roommate, Beverly, a Groton educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont’s godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university’s ‘independent’ newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex crazed, jock obsessed campus she is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different and the exotic allure of her own innocence. With his trademark satirical wit and famously sharp eye for telling detail, Wolfe draws on extensive observations at campuses across the country to immortalize the early 21st century college going experience.

Hooking Up

Only yesterday boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing necking as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that. Third base was oral sex. Home plate was going all the way. That was yesterday. Here in the Year 2000 we can forget about necking. Today’s girls and boys have never heard of anything that dainty. Today first base is deep kissing, now known as tonsil hockey, plus groping and fondling this and that. Second base is oral sex. Third base is going all the way. Home plate is being introduced by name. And how rarely our hooked up boys and girls are introduced by name! as Tom Wolfe has discovered from a survey of girls’ File o Fax diaries, to cite but one of Hooking Up‘s displays of his famed reporting prowess. Wolfe ranges from coast to coast chronicling everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers…
to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves thanks to the hot new field of genetics and neuroscience…
to the inner workings of television’s magazine show sting operations. Printed here in its entirety is ‘Ambush at Fort Bragg,’ a novella about sting TV in which Wolfe prefigured with eerie accuracy three cases of scandal and betrayal that would soon explode in the press. A second piece of fiction, ‘U. R. Here,’ the story of a New York artist who triumphs precisely because of his total lack of talent, gives us a case history preparing us for Wolfe’s forecast ‘My Three Stooges,’ ‘The Invisible Artist’ of radical changes about to sweep the arts in America. As an espresso after so much full bodied twenty first century fare, we get a trip to Memory Mall. Reprinted here for the first time are Wolfe’s two articles about The New Yorker magazine and its editor, William Shawn, which ignited one of the great firestorms of twentieth century journalism. Wolfe’s afterword about it all is in itself a delicious draught of an intoxicating era, the Twistin’ Sixties. In sum, here is Tom Wolfe at the height of his powers as reporter, novelist, sociologist, memoirist, and to paraphrase what Balzac called himself the very secretary of American society in the 21st century.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

‘An excellent book by a genius,’ said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of new journalism. ‘This is a book that will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.’ Newsweek

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Ken Kesey was a Golden Boy scholar, actor, star athlete, one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. But his life took a turn. He did drugs, publicly and flagrantly, and became the 1960’s incarnation of all that was meant by ‘hippie.’ Tom Wolfe turned a tour with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters into THE ELECTRIC KOOL AID ACID TEST. He recounts their romp across America in the first psychedelic bus, their alliance with the Hell’s Angels, their conversion of the biggest anti Vietnam rally of all time into a freak out, their games of hide and seek with the law all with a depth and inventiveness that makes this book one of the most memorable journalistic odysseys of our time.

The Pump House Gang

Tom Wolfe’s second collection 1968 takes it title from a redoubtable surfing elite, many of whom abandoned the beach for the psychedelic indoor sports of the late sixties. Wolfe here continues his fieldwork among noble savages, from La Jolla to London.

Radical Chic: And, Mau Mauing The Flak Catchers

‘Radical Chic’ is Tom Wolfe’s hilarious dissection of the need among wealthy liberals in late ’60s America to be seen to support the correct political causes even if that meant giving champagne receptions for the feared Black Panther Party. ‘Mau Mauing The Flak Catchers’ takes a satirical look at how, during that period of cultural upheaval, minority groups from the ghettoes refined the art of intimidating the white bureaucracy. In these essays, Wolfe’s supercharged yet consummately controlled prose transports the reader back to the heady days of hippie revolution and Black Power. ‘The Painted Word’ is Wolfe’s insightful, flamboyant and supremely readable survey of Modern Art. Taking in Picasso, Pollock and Warhol, he describes the tense relationship between bohemian artists and their wealthy patrons, and concludes that modern art is Theory the paintings and sculptures themselves are mere illustrations of the text. ‘Tome Wolfe is a journalist who always manages to combine an encylopedic store of inside knowledge with the obstinate detachment of a visitor from Mars, not to mention a brilliant style and incisive wit’ ‘San Francisco Chronicle’.

The New Journalism

Tom Wolfe introduces a wide range of journalistic reportage by writers including Truman Capote, Terry Southern, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson.

The Painted Word

‘America’s nerviest journalist’ Newsweek trains his satirical eye on Modern Art in this ‘masterpiece’ The Washington PostWolfe’s style has never been more dazzling, his wit never more keen. He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. This is Tom Wolfe ‘at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent’ San Francisco Chronicle.

Mauve Gloves and Madman, Clutter and Vine

‘When are the 1970s going to begin?’ ran the joke during the Presidential campaign of 1976. With his own patented combination of serious journalism and dazzling comedy, Tom Wolfe met the question head on in these rollicking essays and even provided the 1970s with its name: ‘The Me Decade.’

The Right Stuff

First published in 1979 to extraordinary acclaim, Tom Wolfe’s landmark work became an instant bestseller, going on to sell more than 2.5 million copies. It is a true story that is as exciting as the best fiction the tale of American heroes Yeager, Conrad, Grissom, and Glenn men who were willing to put their lives on the line in pursuit of the final frontier.

With stunning accuracy and captivating prose, Wolfe recounts the details of the lives of these men, their families, and of NASA s Project Mercury program. The result is a vivid history that could only be enhanced by actual historic photographs.

The Right Stuff Illustrated includes hundreds of photographs and reproductions of documents and memorabilia pertaining to the Project Mercury program, the current events surrounding the program, and the political climate that led up to the missions in the early 1960 s. It s the perfect gift book for lovers of history and the space program, as well as the millions of fans of The Right Stuff.

From Bauhaus to Our House

Walter Groppius, granddaddy of steel and glass, conceived his architectural vision in the rubble of WW I and the decadence of Weimar in the decade after. His doctrine found fertile soil in America, where it was time to adopt a clearly defined and suitable representative architecture. Tom Wolfe, author of THE PAINTED WORD and THE RIGHT STUFF, treats us to a chronicle of the trends that ultimately brought us the ubiquitous and baffling ‘glass box’ of modern commerce. ‘Delightfully witty, biting history of modern architecture…
scintillating high comedy of big money, manners and massive manipulation of public taste.’ Publishers Weekly

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