Tom Wolfe in his home office in New York.

The Man in the White Suit Is Back

With his pyrotechnic prose and clinical dissecting of social mores, Tom Wolfe was the pre-eminent chronicler of the United States in the late 20th century. Now, five years after his death, he’s back in the public eye

By Peter Stevenson and George Gurley

Photograph by Gasper Tringale

Tom Wolfe is having a moment. The white-suited, blue-eyed mischief-making enfant terrible who invented “The ‘Me’ Decade” and “Radical Chic,” and coined the phrase “New Journalism” in the 1970s to describe himself and journalists such as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson, is coming around for another lap.

Television writer David E. Kelley has completed shooting a limited-series Netflix adaptation of Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, starring Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane and directed by Regina King. This month, Radical Wolfe, a documentary narrated by Jon Hamm and based on a Vanity Fair profile of Wolfe by Michael Lewis, opens at the IFC Center, in Manhattan, and at the Laemmle Royal, in Los Angeles.