SOURCE: “The Cultural Gamesmanship of Tom Wolfe,” in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 25–30.

In the following essay, Stull criticizes Wolfe for his stereotypes of women and minorities, and for his generalizations about status and politics. Stull believes that Wolfe's “detached observer” writing style removes him from his characters, making them passive participants in Wolfe's literary “games.”

The examination of arcane worlds and societies is one of the central appeals of the new journalism and a fundamental part of Tom Wolfe's writing. While Wolfe ostensibly makes overtures to explain subcultures on their own terms, he in fact describes and understands them all with a strikingly similar method of cultural analysis. Wolfe believes, as he explained in an interview with Tony Schwartz, that “the fundamental unit in analyzing behavior is not the individual, but some sort of status group or status structure.”¹ Wolfe privileges an omniscient authorial...