Thread by @sheilakathleen

It's Tom Wolfe's birthday. I wrote when he died that he comes under the category of WB Yeats' warning about Jonathan Swift: "Imitate him if you dare."

Because, my God, he spawned some horrifying imitators. His style is so ... bossy - there's no other word for it - you submit or you can't go on with it - that it's almost like how every album that came out the year after Sgt Pepper tried to be Sgt Pepper.

And people weren't even consciously trying to imitate Sgt. Pepper. It's just that the album was so dominant, so ... bossy - that culture became like a One-Party-State for a short period and everyone got sucked into its vortex. Tom Wolfe was that kind of writer.

Altho of course there's Right Stuff and Electric Kool-Aid and Radical Chic ... I love his earliest essays. When he basically found himself - and his voice - in a sort of blazing torpedo of almost overnight confidence. Almost like, "Wait ... who SAYS I can't write like this?"

His first breakthrough was in the gigantic essay called "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." He went to a car show, saw the teenagers' obsessions w/cars - talked to some detailers - creating tail fins and swoops, etc. and was like, "These people are Picassos."

"They're Picassos and yet nobody in the art world on the East Coast is paying attention. But these oil-slicked mechanics in a Venice Beach garage are creating the most extraordinary works of art - and teenagers get it - and so what are we - the dummy snobby adults - NOT getting?"

I think he was supposed to turn in 2,000 words and he turned in a 30,000 word behemoth. And Esquire ended up printing the whole thing. It's mind-blowing to imagine what it must have been like to casually pick up Esquire in 1965 and read THAT.

"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" is one of my favorite Tom Wolfe pieces and it was the first. It's like he emerged fully blossomed. But he just went with his instinct: "I need to write about these gearhead teenagers and this is how I need to write about it."

One excerpt: "Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude towards cars since 1945, things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it..."

"especially the ones most hipped on the subject. They are not from the levels of society that produce children who write sensitive analytical prose at age seventeen, or if they do, they soon fall into the hands of English instructors who put them onto Hemingway ..."

"or a lot of goddamn-and-hungry-breast writers. If they ever write about a highway again, it’s a rain-slicked highway and the sound of the automobiles passing over it is like the sound of tearing silk..."

"...not that one household in ten thousand has heard the sound of tearing silk since 1945."

Another: "If Barris and the customizers hadn’t been buried in the alien and suspect underworld of California youth, I don’t think they would seem at all unusual by now. But they’ve had access to almost nothing but the hot-rod press. They’re like Easter Islanders...."

"Suddenly you come upon the astonishing objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why they’re there."

and finally, he busts out the big guns. He draws a line between the car customizers and Art - and he could not be clearer about it. He widens the scope of what is considered art - in one paragraph. I'm sure some people would read this and go, "Oh, PUH-LEEZE, they're just CARS."

If all of this seems totally obvious - like "well, duh, of course cars can be art" ... it's because Tom Wolfe paved the way. This piece caused a sensation. Not everybody loved it. Not everybody thought "what teens are into" was a worthwhile subject for a "serious" writer.

The attitude was "We - the adults - tell people what is art. We - the adults in the New York art world - tell everyone else what is good and right. It is our duty. What teenagers are obsessing over is irrelevant and, frankly, offensive." and etc. Same shit different day.

I'm not as into his fiction, although I've read some of it (not all). Sometimes he misses the mark. But when he hits a bullseye - like, with "Radical Chic" - it's like you never see things quite the same way again. I think about "radical chic" all the time.

I'm imagining everybody in that circle would hesitate before EVER inviting Tom Wolfe to a function again after "Radical Chic" came out.

Kandy-Kolored (etc.) and his earliest essays (mid-60s) are all in this collection: amazon.com/Kandy-Kolored-…

I've been doing a Bookshelf Tour on my Instagram, because I love to look at other people's bookshelves, so I assume the opposite is also true. And here was (coincidentally) yesterday's stop on the tour.