Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? The progenitor of “New Journalism” gets his long-due publishing retrospective, and reappraisal.

 Tom Wolfe’s books are being reissued, in homage, by Picador. But he would never put the news so blandly.

WHOOSH! Off the press they come, slicked bright and hot, ready to be grabbed by woke undergrads in Lululemon who’ve never heard of him but have a vague sense—floated in between the clicks swipe-lefts and scrolled TikToks—that he might be an Influencer….

Ach. Wolfe would write his blurb far better, sweeping angst and desire into trends we have yet to name. He grasped the various ways we see and think, transcribed our slang, and spelled out the sounds that surround us. With a few choice words, he could nail a scene, a trend, or a decade. Sharply aware of class divisions, subcultures, and self-anointed elites, he pitted us against each other with such wit, we barely minded.

I have spent my adult life grateful to this man for loosening and livening up journalism, freeing us from that damned “inverted pyramid” (which frontloads all the facts in an ugly crush on the assumption that no one will read to the end) and the obligatory “nut graf,” placed early to tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em. He preferred suspense. An elegant trickster, he bent journalism toward the rhythms of literature.

Now I am wondering if, in the process, he killed democracy.

Not with a single inky stab, of course. The throes have lasted for decades, and this murder is obviously the Orient Express sort, with one assailant after another taking their turn. But did Tom Wolfe, that gracious white-suited southerner who once urged me to eat chicken soup, stab first?

•  •  •

Perched on a bar stool at the telephone alcove of our 1940s bungalow, I fumble open a skinny reporter’s notebook, then drop my pen. Cursing, I slide off the stool, wishing I were at a newsroom desk. Instead, I am home, clad in pajamas, waiting, eager as a teenager with a new boyfriend, for our glossy black retro phone to ring.

My fever is so high, I am woozy, and when I kneel to reach the pen, I nearly crumple. If I could just lie down for a minute, right there on the hardwood floor…. But no, I clamber back up and hoist myself onto the stool. Double pneumonia is not going to keep me from interviewing Tom Wolfe.

He is about to receive the 1990 Saint Louis Literary Award, previously bestowed upon W.H. Auden, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie….

Bbrrrrrriiiinnnnng—he is right on time. Gagging on phlegm, I shyly introduce myself. My journalism god is instantly, warmly sympathetic. The cliches are true, he informs me. Chicken soup will help.

In a delirium that is half awe, half Streptococcus pneumoniae, I proceed to interview him. He is urbane, genteel, so confident he almost preens. But warranted ego is easy to forgive.

A week later, Wolfe arrives in St. Louis to receive the award. Mended, I sit in the audience filling another notebook. He is not doing what we expected, airing his thoughts about the failures of the contemporary novel and its desperate need for journalistic reportage. Instead he baffles us by speaking, almost prophetically, about the coming climate change: how it will cause not just an overall warming but wild fluctuations in climate, flood and drought, species extinctions, migration of viruses. To his bookish audience, hardly a science major among us, all this is still new and strange.

Years later, I will try to find a copy or recording of that speech and fail. A friend was there but does not remember what he said. Did I hallucinate those words? Not sure I could have. They were uncannily prescient. They were, in other words, inimitably Wolfe: seeing the trend clearly, stripping it to its essence, then elaborating with precise, telling details.

•  •  •

Though a brilliant observer, he was not terribly introspective. Growing up in a neighborhood where college professors mixed with blue-collar workers, Tom watched his mom make sandwiches for hungry tramps during the Depression. Later he claimed he barely remembered those years: “You just screen out everything around that’s unpleasant.” Yet he spent his life hyperfocused on class and status—and was convinced we all were.

An odd conclusion for a man who, despite a healthy ego, seemed fairly oblivious to others’ opinions of him. Sure, the flamboyant white suit was a bid for attention, but only as a tool, to make sure he would be recognized. He wanted access, total immersion into someone else’s world, but he never, ever pretended to belong. Rather than dress the part and try to blend in, he came as the outsider in the white suit. Then he set out to penetrate his subject’s psyche.

I was thrilled to learn that, like me, Wolfe was an only child, wound up getting a doctorate in American studies, hated stuffy institutional rules, ignored boring injunctions to “write what you know,” and took a big pay cut to buy himself more freedom. Alas, the similarities ended there. His style was fresh, bold, and inimitable (Lord knows we all tried). As a kid, he had longed to be related to Thomas Wolfe, to have that literary pedigree. Alas, the connection was only a phonetic coincidence, so he satisfied himself by stealing literary devices and sneaking them into journalism.

He inserted dialogue and flourishes of description, stole idiom and tucked it into his own prose; shaped his syllables like poetry, sprinkled in verboten exclamation marks and an exaggeration of ellipses (surely that should be the collective noun?). Journalist Walter Lippmann’s vaunted goal of cool, neutral objectivity bored Wolfe silly. Instead of marching in lockstep, his prose did cartwheels. Personal observation, subjective experiences, narrative techniques—suddenly journalists who had been writing in black and white had a big, tiered 64-box of Crayolas and permission to go outside the lines.

Wolfe used all his senses. “Ggghhzzzzzhhhhggggzzzzzeeeong!—gawdam!” was Junior Johnson’s racecar peeling out. Pronunciations signified: the Eastern boarding school grads honked, Wolfe told us, lifting their vowels from palate to nose. They would never dream of saying “owies” for “always” or “electrizziddy” for “electricity or “for the moment” as “footer moment.” And oh, did clothes signify: “One does not want to arrive ‘poor-mouthing it’ in some outrageous turtleneck and West Eighth Street bell-jean combination, as if one is ‘funky’ and of ‘the people,’” he wrote in “Radical Chic,” voicing the secret consternation of the liberal elite.

“You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes,” he wrote in Bonfire. And he told Michael Lewis: “I honestly think that everyone—unless they are in danger of losing their lives—makes their decisions on status.”

“He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked,” explains David Brooks, introducing the new edition of Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. “Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the careful way people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us.”

The observing was his real genius. People exult in Wolfe’s flourishes of style, but they would have faded from view if they had not been accurate. He did the work. He read, he immersed himself, he hung out with whoever or whatever he was writing about for far longer than most reporters could bear.

His idol was Emile Zola: “He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people,” he told The Guardian. “But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie.”

As Wolfe wrote in The Bonfire of the Vanities, “A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.” Lies, pretension, even gender posturing—all of it felt hollow to him. In A Dangerous Fiction, Louise Colbran writes that for Wolfe, masculinity was “merely another form of status….shallow and performative,” dependent upon society.

Because he revealed so much of “society” as window dressing, Wolfe was hard to categorize. At the peak of his popularity, he was the darling of the left, even as he mocked their excesses. Today, he is close to being canceled. One critic after another insists that he was a conservative, and even Wikipedia brands him so: “Although a conservative in many ways (in 2008, he claimed never to have used LSD and to have tried marijuana only once), Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.”

Drug use is the political litmus test?

Back in 2004, after Wolfe braved the admission, “I have sympathy with what George Bush is trying to do,” The Guardian grilled him. He would not say whether he intended to vote for Bush, but he did speculate about why others would: “Support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions….  Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called ‘red states’—a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree—which here means, literally, middle America.”

Prescient as ever.

“A large number of people have remained religious,” he continued, “and it is a divided country.” When Tina Brown asked at a media dinner, “How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?” Wolfe decided that “Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States.” In his scathing piece “Radical Chic,” which described a fundraiser Leonard Bernstein hosted for the Black Panthers, the “impulse was not political,” Wolfe said. “It was simply the absurdity of the occasion.” The absurdity, but also the hypocrisy, and the lockstep conformity he saw increasing on the left and found utterly boring, stripped of variation.

At the time of the interview, Wolfe had just written I Am Charlotte Simmons, a book about the “bad comedy” of college sports, but more essentially, “about sex as it interacts with social status.” After spending four years on campus gathering very raw material from college kids, he named their language “fuck patois” and winced at the amount of time they spent drunk and “loaded with creatine and cocaine.” “Much of modern sex is un-erotic,” he said sadly, noting that the ease of consummation put pressure on everybody, girls especially.

This was his Virginia-born conservatism: southern, courteous, and old-fashioned, despite his constant plunge into the icy new.

•  •  •

Did Wolfe do such a good job capturing the present that he ruined our future? Consider the trajectory. Lippmann urged objectivity in 1920 because he saw “everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled.” He worried about news coming at us “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion,” and readers “protected by no rules of evidence.” He was afraid of a time when people “cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions—what somebody asserts, not what actually is.”

Here we are.

In the century between 1920 and 2025, journalists first tried for objectivity, then broke free from convention in the 1960s and 1970s with the New Journalism, named by Wolfe and led by him, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Hunter S. Thompson. The shift would be defined by Marc Weingarten as “journalism that reads like fiction and rings with the truth of reported fact.” Its arrival rang out like a high, clear church bell, elating young feature writers. Its new freedom even colored newswriting, which began to set scenes for us, paint in vivid detail, and smuggle in the first person.

Wolfe was so immersed, observant, and detached that he often got it right. But many of the journalists who followed slid away from the heavy-duty reporting that was the only way to keep New Journalism honest. They learned to write “like” Wolfe, in terms of flourish, without taking the time he took to report the substance. Laden with multiple, rapid deadlines, even the most earnest journalists were unable to climb on a bus and ride cross-country with their subject for a year. Others were wannabe novelists or gonzo reporters hungrier for attention than for accuracy. A succession of journalists were caught plagiarizing; creating composites, glomming various people they had interviewed into a single, named character; hiring other reporters to go to the scene and feed them details; or, not to put too fine a point on it, making shit up.

But good, ethical reporters lost readers’ trust, too. They borrowed New Journalism’s techniques to liven up news stories—which then read like fiction. If someone said of a profile I wrote, “It was like reading a novel,” a thrill ran through me. Once I described the scenery and temperature on a group’s pilgrimage to Israel—interviewing each traveler at length and looking up weather stats and flora and fauna and the colors in the soil and sand—and a friend asked how my trip was. Again, I took this as a compliment. But I was less sure when I gathered bureaucratic background for a local political controversy, watched the long, tedious video of the council meeting, then wrote the piece present tense, carefully setting the scene of the meeting. One official called me and screamed, “You weren’t even there!”

Explaining that scene-setting was a convention of narrative journalism felt a little lame, even to me. Literary techniques make it easy to fudge, and readers sense that.

On the other hand, when someone demanded, “How could you know what he was thinking?” I always had a simple answer: “I asked.” If someone had grilled Wolfe about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, they would have learned that everything he reported he had either seen or heard himself, found recorded elsewhere, or learned from people who were there. Often if a piece feels vivid and imaginative, people cannot believe it to be accurate. But New Journalism (now old and usually called literary journalism or creative nonfiction) makes the research invisible on purpose. The effort to be artful often means leaving a little wiggle room, not moving in blow-by-blow chronological order or including every detail and caveat. Wolfe’s work crackled with sassy, informed opinion; he was always interpreting, never laying it out flat. Yet he shied away from first-person, pointing out that most of his major writing was “completely about the lives of other people, with myself hardly intruding into the narratives at all. They were based on reporting, so a lot of it is impersonal and objective. It can be discouraging to see it described as implausible, personal, and unbelievable”—just because it is lively.

Maybe journalism’s failure lay in not educating the public about what these techniques make possible. Maybe it lay in abdicating the immersive reporting that makes the techniques work. Or maybe the loss of faith in journalism has nothing to do with any of that, and this entire essay is just an excuse to miss Tom Wolfe.

•  •  •

And here I move from blame to need. If ever we could have used Wolfe’s style of reportage, it is now, when journalism desperately needs to be compelling again. Imagine how he would skewer Trump’s bloated avarice and desperate narcissism, and what fun he would have with the huuuuge crowds, the childish insults, the gaudy gold, the sniveling tech bros who secretly want to rule the world but must ride to power on the president’s made-in-China coattails. If Wolfe had followed the 2024 campaign the way he climbed into Ken Kesey’s bus… if he covered both MAGA and the “coastal elites”…we might all be reading the same articles again.

Also, that obsession with status would be supremely useful, now that the gap between classes has turned into an abyss.

“He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting,” Brooks writes. Imagine what attention he would lavish on the rise of the tech bros, the motley new Cabinet, the fall of the Washington establishment, the helpless despair of the old liberal Democrats, the chortling of the Christian Nationalists, the fury of the young.

Wolfe documented the chaos of the sixties, tagged the seventies “the Me decade,” called the eighties “the decade of money fever.” What would he name us? Contemporary journalists have tried to capture the zeitgeist, but at most they throw adjectives on the page, as I just did. Hamstrung and fallen from glory, the profession is consumed by worry over its clicks and subscriptions. Wolfe would not have wasted two seconds worrying about either. He would simply dig in, report the hell out of whatever scene felt juicy, write the hell out of it, and turn it in. What he came up with was irresistible—not only because it was audacious, but because it was so thoroughly researched, observed, and analyzed, then deftly arranged to pull meaning from the details and leave out all the boring parts.

Who does that now? I was eager to read a piece by a reporter who wound up living next door to two fervent Trump supporters and forming a friendship with them…but there was no trajectory. Nothing changed, no insights emerged. I get it: I’ve tried dozens of times to talk to people who support Donald Trump and wound up in the same nowhere. The current challenge is different than the social chaos Wolfe confronted; he at least had parameters of reality, ropes that held all the sparring parties in one place. Plus, he wrote for publications enjoyed by readers with many different opinions. There is a sameness in our silos now; I find myself over-careful when I voice any idea that does not conform to the slightly-left-of-center canon where I generally feel most at home.

Over-careful is a problem. Here is New Yorker reporter Clare Malone talking to the Columbia Journalism Review for a piece titled “‘Still Shooting Ourselves in the Foot, Over and Over’”: “We have to balance the belief that we are doing the right thing and that we are getting the best information by also being self-conscious of whether we are communicating it in the best way.” Sweet God. That much self-consciousness can only inhibit. Wolfe did not second-guess himself; he was too caught up in his subject. Indifferent to the usual need to be thanked by one’s sources or patted on the head by one’s editor, he had the triple luxuries of independence, time, and space.

Skimping on research, time, and space is also a problem. As is preaching, losing one’s detachment and lightness of touch. At CJR, Josh Hersh wonders “if we can possibly, somehow, find a way to have a good time.” The podcasts and digital shows that are drawing big audiences are having fun, he points out. Of course, traditional journalism “must continue to find a way to communicate important truths,” but perhaps with a little more energy and verve, and “without coming off as moralizing.” Otherwise, “who’s going to want to join us?”

What was special about Wolfe, in the end, was that he was having such a damned good time—and therefore, so were we.

•  •  •

Imagine his return. He strides into the office of some New York magazine editor, which he would choose God knows, and demands enough space for 25,000 words.

“You’ll be pushing their attention span at 5K,” the editor warns. “And if you’re angling for more money, don’t bother. We can only pay you a tenth of your old rate.”

Wolfe crosses his legs, gazes back calmly. “How long do I have?”

“Deadline’s first of next month. Things move faster these days. Gotta keep it fresh. Oh, and lay off the insulting caricatures. Careful with your language, too. Don’t get yourself canceled, but don’t be too woke.”

One of Wolfe’s eyebrow rises, almost imperceptibly. He has been more woke by being blunt than he could ever be under these constraints.

“And document everything. We can’t keep hauling in lawyers, and these bastards sue just because they can. Trump’s gonna open up libel laws to make it easier to drag us to court for any unfavorable coverage. You can still focus on class, you’re obsessed with it. But Jesus, don’t attack any tech billionaires. One of ’em might buy us next month.”

With a slight smile, Wolfe stands, already planning to take his piece to a different publication. But where? The Atlantic tempts him, for all its leftist bias, but publishing there will rule out half the country, and he hates to lose the audience. Esquire might have him back. Or what about SubStack? If the piece “goes viral,” he can mock the phrase in his next piece.

“Has anybody doxed you?” the editor calls after him. Wolfe turns back, a question on his face. “Is your home address out there? Family information? We can’t afford security, so you might want to take a little vacation after we come out. Go abroad, someplace that doesn’t hate us. Mauritius, maybe.”

A shrug. “I’m not worried.”

“You oughtta be.” The editor rattles off recent violent attacks against journalists in the United States. “This is not your world anymore.”

•  •  •

If he did come back, what would he find?

New Journalism was dubbed “the art of fact.” Now, a frank loathing of the cultural elite has made the word “art” suspect, and truthiness has replaced fact altogether. With the media landscape fragmented and the political divisions growing more extreme, the mainstream press is choosing political sides, losing half the country either way.

During Donald Trump’s first term as president, The Washington Post calculated that he had lied 30,573 times. Yet somehow it was the media who lost the trust of half the nation. The traditional press is no longer information’s gatekeeper. Some rejoice at its ouster—but the disempowering of mainstream media also means the guardrails are gone. Walter Cronkite would have never dared lie to us. Today, anyone could be lying. Corporate owners have cut back not only on in-depth features and investigative reporting and leaned hard on editors. Which means less big-picture perspective, less wisdom at the helm, less fact-checking, and less courage.

Big city dailies have shrunk, small local papers have shuttered, and not many magazines are left. Podcasts, social media, and YouTube shows are the only news sources for many. Even I now prefer news filtered through a personal viewpoint or a podcast chat. There are too many facts, and they are complex. A smart human can add a layer of coherent meaning and emotional valence, making the painful parts bearable.

How odd, that after pronouncing traditional media untrustworthy, we would turn to opinion and interpretation for our news. Maybe because the subjectivity is so obvious, we can drop our guard?

Great newsgathering, analysis, and longform feature writing still exist. But until the recent burst of chaos, outlets swung back and forth like a drunk hanging from a chandelier. Before the 2016 election, they bent over backwards to cover Trump “fairly,” quoting every idiotic statement with the solemn deference one accords to mature, adult debate. This bothsidesism quickly became more mathematical than journalistic, with editors measuring column issues instead of relevance. When Trump won and the big news outlets realized they were out of touch with his supporters, they went “out into the field” and pretty well proved it by filing more inane quotes that still refused to grapple with real issues. When his near-incomprehensible rhetoric and inability to grasp more than “a concept of” policy began to feel dangerous and they were accused of “sanewashing,” they gave up the bothsidesism and turned blunt, warning, like Cassandra, of consequences.

Now I wince when I read the newspapers and magazines I love and agree with, because the bias has become so normative, I keep wondering what I am missing, what the “other side” might be saying to counter this. Independent newsletters like Tangle are a relief, because they calmly present the best of the left and the right, knowing that the middle has dropped out and every outlet has a stance. Then the editor offers his own take, which nearly always feels balanced, rational, and sane, whether I agree or not.

A bigger, farther-reaching Tangle might help us talk to one another again. But it still will not show us ourselves in prose that is so colorful, microscopically detailed, and compelling that we read it even when it stings. Journalism will remain an obligation of democracy, a daily multivitamin hard to persuade people to swallow.

•  •  •

I thought my nostalgic desire to first blame, then resurrect Tom Wolfe was a private whim. Then I came upon several articles that asked, rhetorically, “Why is there no Tom Wolfe today?” Why have we no journalists capable of sketching society with so many telling details, so much captured emotion, that we begin to grasp its changes?

First, because those on the right are too angry to play. Second, because Wolfe’s favorite target, the wealthy liberal cultural elite, is either extinct or gone into hiding, and the less flashy professors and artists who remain are blander and less fun to caricature. “The snobs who populated the art world Wolfe once mocked have largely disappeared as the landscape has given way to an open embrace of finance and technology on the one hand, and overt political display on the other,” Nick Burns points out.

Third, because journalists are not given time to immerse themselves, gaining the understanding that allows deft caricature. Fourth, because they are no longer even permitted to caricature. (Unless, of course, their target is extreme MAGA, in which case the work has been done for them in advance, and no real insight emerges.) “The list of acceptable targets for ridicule (right-wing politicians, tech executives, et cetera) grows ever shorter,” Burns notes, “and to depart from it is to risk being accused of disrespect.”

The fifth possible cause is that liberals can no longer stomach satire. But why are they touchier now than they were in the seventies? Not because they are woke or hypersensitive, but because they are embattled, shoved out of cozy dominance, bewildered by the turn the world has taken. As Burns puts it, “A politically weakened liberalism found the joke wasn’t funny anymore.”

•  •  •

When we resurrect Wolfe, he will of course turn his attention to status and class. But with one foot on the elite side and one foot with the proletarian, he will soon feel an uncomfortable rip in his groin muscles, the middle having slid away.

Nonetheless, he will find ways to entertain us, providing the catharsis otherwise relegated to smartaleck late-night TV. Granted, we will not see the muck investigative reporters used to be paid to unearth. That was never Wolfe’s beat. He investigated both inequity and iniquity, but his goal was to interpret subcultures for us, not reveal individual sins.

Could he train the reporters who are earnest about policy and ethics to write in ways that make those issues both clear and fascinating? Could his new-now-old techniques be used without sacrificing accountability, attribution, and precision? And the biggest question: could the Fourth Estate be given a second chance by everyone who cares about this country, whatever their political bent? That would go a long way toward resuscitating democracy. We might have ways to talk to one another again, comparing notes on the same information.

As it is, mainstream media preaches to its choir because anything else feels useless, thankless, and increasingly dangerous. We have grown careful to the point of paranoia. If Woodward and Bernstein had been this squirrelly, Richard Nixon would have stayed in office.

Yet the paranoia is warranted. Reporters of Wolfe’s era did not have militias collecting their data. “He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter,” recounts a ProPublica piece surveilling one of these groups. The dossier included the reporter’s address and phone number, along with photos of his home.

People say they voted for Trump a second time to ensure freedom of speech—meaning the ability to speak their mind without worrying about the woke police. Yet Trump is quick to punish and shut out any reporter who writes something he does not like. Today’s journalists have to worry about being locked out of White House briefings and the Pentagon, about corporate owners kneeling before him and silencing coverage.

“You know who’s in charge of Voice of America now?” Wolfe’s purported editor might snap. “Keri Lake, a right-wing election denier who called journalists ‘monsters’ and promised to be our ‘worst nightmare’ back when she ran for governor of Arizona. Trump posted her mandate on social: to ‘ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.’”

The egos at the top are spun from blown glass, and they shatter at the slightest impact. Reactions are not rational and judicious, and the barrage is schooling us to either shut down or overreact.

Wolfe’s playfulness might not land well.

A smart young writer friend recently dug up “Radical Chic,” and he pronounced Wolfe mean. My friend is Black, and he found descriptions like “fuzzy-wuzzy Afros” insulting and demeaning. Even New York Magazine, which published the nearly 25,000-word piece in 1970, now says it was “mean, maybe too mean.”

“The physical descriptions—yeah, I can see where they might seem sophomoric and insulting,” I said slowly. “But I think his point was that all of that was costume—both the Panthers’ exaggerated Afros and the White liberals’ trying-too-hard, carefully hip party clothes. He was skewering the display, the hypocrisy and hyped-up role play, to show where the racial and class tension had landed us.”

Was I trying too hard? No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias. Wolfe was not political in that way. Nor was he personal; he had no interest in profiling the deep character flaws of Leonard Bernstein or even drawing him in three dimensions. Wolfe’s metier was society: how we clash or align, what inspires and drives us, what judgments and hypocrisies divide us.

His crossover literary genre was satire, and like many satirists, he tended toward caricature. But he used those exaggerations in service of insight. For him, “show don’t tell” was an impulse as natural as breathing. He showed us people behaving in ways carefully calibrated to signify their position in the crisscrossed, scribbled over, annotated and caveated yet still strangely rigid hierarchy that is class in the United States. Everyone had, and still has, particular roles already scripted for them. He played them out in print, and he did not bother to be gentle.

There is no latitude left for someone like Wolfe, no vast middle class that climbs or slips, pretends or exploits. Money rules us even more obviously, and it is concentrated in far fewer hands. The center stopped holding years ago, and blistering honesty is reserved for the renegades who will be easy to pick off if they grow too powerful. Bias colors everything else, sending us to separate media outlets and making it virtually impossible to talk across our separate “facts.”

Wolfe was charming enough to insinuate himself with groups on either side. Sent into “the field”—that phrase already a clue—he would remain courteous, watch closely, and find revelations in casual exchanges, daily objects, clothes and haircuts, tantrums and dreams. Instead of bringing back cliches and scripted rhetoric, he would find out why people believe what they do, how they justify it, what really scares them.

And what fun he would have with all the vulgarity and macho posturing, not to mention the new Masters of the Universe, stirring up chaos while they keep bunkers in other countries. How would Wolfe handle Elon Musk, who is almost parody in his natural state? He would capture the obeisance, the bowing and scraping of the Trump coterie in Congress and the corporate titans who pay them. He would mock MAGA and the shell-shocked liberals in a single paragraph.

And no mainstream editor, left or right, would dare print what he turned in.

Even in the ways his resurrection would fail, he is still reflecting us back to ourselves.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.