Tom Wolfe

He married Sheila Berger in 1978 and the couple has two children, Alexandra and Thomas.

An atheist, Wolfe is 82 years old and currently lives with his family in New York City.

Tom was born to Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr. an agronomist and Louise Wolfe, a landscape designer.

As a child he attended the St. Christopher's School, Richmond, Virginia, where he was the student council president. Apart from being the editor of the newspaper published by the school, He was also an excellent baseball player.

He graduated in 1949 and went to the Washington and Lee University, where he pursued English literature.

At the university, he was appointed the editor of the sports section in the college newspaper and also helped establish ‘Shenandoah’, his college literary magazine.

He graduated with honors in 1951 after which he tried hands at baseball, and began playing at semi-professional level whilst at college.

He began his career as a reporter for ‘The Republican’, a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1956.

He left ‘The Republican’ to work as a newspaperman for ‘The Washington Post’ where he covered the Cuban Revolution and was awarded the Washington Newspaper Guild Award for Foreign News Reporting, in 1961.

‘The New York Herald Tribune’ hired him in 1962, as a reporter and feature writer where he wrote articles for the paper’s Sunday supplement, later released as ‘New York Magazine’.

He was asked by the Esquire magazine to write an article on hot rod culture of Southern California, which he struggled to write. However, unable to deliver the article just before the due date in 1962, he sent a letter to the editor of the magazine explaining his ideas. Fascinated by the letter itself, the editor removed the greeting and published it as it was.

Wolfe received mixed reviews for the article which, according to him, promulgated ‘the New Journalism’, a novel journalistic writing style. A collection of his articles he had contributed to Esquire were made into a book and published under the title ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ in 1965. The book became a rage among car lovers.

His first collection of essays ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ was hugely popular and became a bestseller.

His book ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’, which is considered one of his best works in the stream of ‘New Journalism’, explores the beginning and development of the hippie movement.

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’, his first novel, received immense critical appreciation, much more than his other publications, and was also a bestseller for a very long time.