SOURCE: “Tom Wolfe's Narratives as Stories of Growth,” in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 19–24.

In the following essay, Stokes focuses on the relationship between the narrator and the subject of Wolfe's works, and the effect that relationship has on the reader.

“What a feast was spread out before every writer in America! How could any writer resist plunging into it? I couldn't.”

So admits Tom Wolfe in his recent manifesto “for the new social novel” which appeared in Harper's.¹ Wolfe didn't simply plunge—he cannonballed into the literary scene with the publication in 1965 of his collected essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and the resounding waves have continued to be felt with his non-fiction novels The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff and his social novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. His splashes get attention—whether the reader loves or hates Wolfe, all...