Tom Wolfe

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1930 age 0

   Born

2. 1983 age 53

   CreditThe Right Stuffscreenwriter

3. 2018 age 88

   Died

• SGScott Glenn1 title
• LHLance Henriksen1 title
• JGJeff Goldblum1 title
• VCVeronica Cartwright1 title
• SWScott Wilson1 title
• OJO-Lan Jones1 title
• EHEd Harris1 title
• PKPhilip Kaufman1 title
• BHBarbara Hershey1 title
• HSHarry Shearer1 title

• Influenced by

  • NMNorman Mailer
  • HTHunter S. Thompson
  • EHErnest Hemingway
  • JKJack Kerouac

Nothing recorded for: Spouse, Partner, Parents, Children, Siblings, Studied under, Taught.

• 
  Photo:White House Photo by Susan Sterner.Public domain

• At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• ...Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times.

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about —<br /> "—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to —"<br /> — all in a plain country accent about something — well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said. <br /> "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said. <br /> He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch — <br /> lightning.

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but... revealing themselves for the first time and happening... Now... as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is one with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabs — A-rabs behin

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus."

  Tom Wolfe, CC BY-SA 4.0