He did, indeed, have The Right Stuff.
Author Tom Wolfe, one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century, died today at 88.
New York Times obit.
As an old Deadhead, I became aware of his writings first in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a raucous (is there any other word to describe) look at Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters as they careened from the “normal” and shocked the straight world in the middle 1960s.
The Times:
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.
And, as outstanding as was the movie version of The Right Stuff, still, no movie can touch the book.
Wolfe was able to turn journalism into something more, digging deep into the stories he was telling, sometimes becoming part of the story, always larger than the story somehow.
RIP Mr. Wolfe.