‘New journalism’ legend Wolfe dead

New York: Tom Wolfe, an early practitioner of "new journalism" who captured the mood and culture of America across five decades with books, including "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", "The Right Stuff" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities", has died at the age of 87. Wolfe, who had a knack for coining phrases such as "radical chic" and "the me decade", died of an unspecified infection in a New York City hospital, his agent Lynn Nesbit said in a phone interview on Tuesday. Wolfe's works, fiction and non-fiction alike, looked at realms ranging from the art world to Wall Street to 1960s hippie culture and touched on the issues of class, power, race, corruption and sex. “I think every living moment of a human's life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status," Wolfe said in an interview. He was never deterred by the fact that he often did not fit in with his research subjects. Reuters