Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life
the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in
works like "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities,"
died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection.
He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the
enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.
[...]
From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," an account of his
reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains
a classic chronicle of the counterculture, "still the best account -- fictional or non, in print or on film -- of of the genesis
of the '60s hipster subculture," the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book's
40th anniversary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/obituaries/tom-wolfe-pyrotechnic-nonfiction-writer-and-novelist-dies-at-88.html
