Wolfe also produced a series of articles for Esquire and New York that laid the foundation for the New Journalism, a style of writing that combined journalistic accuracy with a novelist's eye for description, theme, and point of view.

In 1962, he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and a staff writer for New York magazine, pounding out stories alongside Jimmy Breslin. Like other writers before him, Wolfe yearned to test his talents in New York.

A tour as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent followed in 1960, earning him an award from the Washington Newspaper Guild for his coverage of the Cuban revolution. in American Studies from Yale in 1957, Wolfe plunged into a decade-long career as a newspaperman, beginning with a stint at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union.

As the man in the iconic white suit with a swaggering pen, Wolfe has spent the past fifty years chronicling America's status battles and capturing our cultural zeitgeist.Īfter earning a Ph.D. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America’s master chronicler.'I think every living moment of a human being's life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status,' Tom Wolfe has said. With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ’00s. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.Īs Charlotte encounters Dupont’s privileged elite-her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont’s godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university’s “independent” newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus-she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives. Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. Dupont University-the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America’s youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition.

I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe