Tom Wolfe, 1930-Â?2018

The passing of Tom Wolfe last month at eighty-eight was met, as was appropriate, by an outpouring of affectionate commemoration. True, the praise, the enthusiasm, the fondness was here and there punctuated by some sniffy (though generally envious) boorishness about how Wolfe, despite his zaniness, was a reactionary, merely a journalist pretending to be a novelist, or about how he perpetuated class distinctions by exacerbating status anxiety. The Nation, which, like Dewar's Scotch, never varies, described him as a “reactionary dandy of late capitalism,” which pleased us if for no other reason than that, since we have not been infesting the halls of academia much these days, it had been ages since we had encountered anyone who deployed the term “late capitalism” straight. As for the epithet “journalist” (which is never complete when uttered by academics without at least an implied prefatory “mere”), we like to think that Tom Wolfe would have smiled on the observation made by the English music critic Ernest Newman that “ ‘Journalist' is a term of abuse employed by writers who are not read about writers who are.”