Tom Wolfe- 1930–
Wolfe earned instant fame with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine- Flake Streamline Baby (1964), a collection of essays that reported on (and satirized) American fads and personalities of the early 1960s. This was followed by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), a chronicle of the psychedelic drug culture of the later 1960s. These works established Wolfe as a hip, irreverent verbal virtuoso, who applied the techniques of a novelist to journalism, creating what was soon dubbed the “New Journalism.”
Wolfe continued to apply this technique The Right Stuff (1979), about the early U.S. manned space program, and he also wrote more conventional novels, which satirized aspects of contemporary culture.