RIP.
His daughter also went to Duke and he gave the commencement speech in 2002.
One of my favorite authors.
Electric Koolaid and The Right Stuff are two of my favorite books of all time.
~rthomas
RIP.
His daughter also went to Duke and he gave the commencement speech in 2002.
IMO, one of the GOAT!
This Michael Lewis Vanity Fair piece on Wolfe, his favorite author, is well worth it.
How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe
I saw Tom cavorting about the Magnolia Grill a few times when I was there tanking up on martinis...
I unfortunately never read it (still on my to do list), but I believe his third novel, Charlotte Simmons, was supposed to be largely based on Duke, particularly since his daughter went there. I read Bonfire and A Man in Full and greatly enjoyed them both. As one who worked in the bond business in NY for a while, briefly lived in Atlanta and went to Duke, I always felt connected to his book topics, though I have no link to his final novel about Cubans in Miami.
I Am Charlotte Simmons is not as highly-regarded as most of his other works, but it kept me turning pages, and had the ring of truth ... sadly.
Dupont Univ. is a composite, but if it's not mostly Duke, then the several colleges at which he did his research have much more in common than they'd probably care to admit.
The daughter interviews the father: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-wol...eur-1472750164
I saw Tom Wolfe speak at a university about a decade ago -- I guess he was doing research then for his book on language referenced in the piece linked above -- and he seemed a creationist then, noting (as I recall) that the jump from organisms w/out to those with language/speech was too great to have happened in an evolutionary manner.
He also told tales of "Maggie of the Stacks" (of the Yale Library) and the "season of the rising sap." God, he was terrific.
Yeah people speculated that it was based on Duke, but he stated it was a combination of places that served as part of the inspiration.
"Wolfe researched the novel by talking to students at North Carolina, Florida, Penn, Duke, Stanford, and Michigan. Wolfe suggested it depicts the American university today at a fictional college that is 'Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one.' "
There's also a St. Ray's fraternity whereas there's a St. A's at Penn, so he probably took stuff from everywhere and we're just more attuned to the Duke similarities.
We are alums of the same prep school in Richmond, and I vividly remember the powers that be shuttling classes to showings of The Right Stuff. I always wished that he would pay a visit to St. Christopher's while I was there, but he showed up several years later for his 50th anniversay. His parties in NYC were epic. I now live in the Triangle, but I imagine that it's been a sad month in Richmond with Tom Wolfe passing away and Vic Bubas being interred up there.
Thought of this feud this morning. I very much sided with Wolfe; can't stand Updike.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...n.artsfeatures
As is Duke Law grad (and current S. Ct. commentator) Garrett Epps, I believe. Epps presents a fictionalized account of the school in his late 1970s entertaining political novel "The Shad Treatment" (which at the end foreshadows the Confederate monument debates of today, but is mostly about the political players in Virginia in the 1960s and 70s).
To the best of my limited knowledge, Redick's situation wasn't much at all like Jojo's. They were both white, and have names that have some Js. That's about it.
I suspect there are certain archetypal events and situations in college that some of us may mistakenly think are idiosyncratic to Duke.
I can't recall if Dupont U was actually said to be located in North Carolina. But Charlotte Simmons was from NC. And Dupont was a mid-size, elite private university with gothic architecture and an outstanding basketball program, whose players are seldom seen in ordinary student circles, but are regarded like living gods. Dupont also was characterized as having an undergraduate population that, to a surprising degree, went from being top-shelf HS kids to kids who are no longer as interested in the life of the mind as with alcohol, sex, and most of all, social status.
Nice overview here: http://www.achievement.org/achiever/...lfe/#biography
And a neat letter he wrote to the buyer of his boyhood home:
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.town...f1e7e7.pdf.pdf
As did his sister, getting a master's later in life: https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf...va/vi00277.xml