Essay collections by tom wolfe

Dobell simply printed Wolfe’s forty-nine pages of notes under the title “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and Wolfe’s career as a stylist and chronicler of popular culture—and of what Wolfe himself called “Pop Society”—was born.

Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 4458 Wolfe is the ultimate decadent stylist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He invented his psychedelic style as if by accident, as he explained in the introduction of The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Up against a deadline, Wolfe concluded that he could not write the piece but told Esquire he would pass on his notes to Bryon Dobell, the managing editor, so that other writers could shape them into a story.

Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, which he describes as being “realistic” fiction, can and should be read as a sociological satire on status—how it is achieved and how it can be lost. It is also a treatise on power and politics, exposing the decadent and corrupt nature of New York City.