Grand Old Man of the New Journalism

At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers “designed to appeal to a new generation.”

But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like “Bonfire of the Vanities,” someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.

In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.

But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote “Radical Chic” for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury.

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