08-07-2025
My father, Tom Wolfe: I wonder what he would think now
T here are giants of the written word, and there are giants. Tom Wolfe was the man in the white suit who bestrode journalism and fiction, and qualified as a colossus in both. Not only did he revolutionise magazine writing, he established the term 'New Journalism' to define a movement in his own image. As for his novels, a young Margaret Atwood once drily remarked: 'It looks as if Tom Wolfe said to the other male American novelists: 'Mine is bigger than yours.'' And it was, not least in the guise of 1987's 700-page, zeitgeist-defining The Bonfire of the Vanities, anatomising the New York he had made home.
But no one is a legend to their offspring. Wolfe's daughter, the writer Alexandra Wolfe, 44, recalls: 'As a child I just remember thinking it was magical that he worked from home. Everybody else's fathers went to work in a suit but mine worked from home in his. I knew that I wasn't supposed to go into his office when I heard the typewriter. He would write ten pages a day, triple-spaced. And when he was done with the ten pages, he would go about his day. But often he was writing after dinner too. So it wasn't like he finished by noon and then went golfing.'
