Remembering Tom Wolfe

A life well lived.

It’s reasonable to say that Tom Wolfe succeeded in cutting a figure in American life comparable to another white-suited, big-spending writer, Mark Twain.

Indeed, I’d argue that Wolfe was near his peak for longer than Twain and on a wider variety of subjects (Twain was the master of writing about being a youth on the Mississippi — a great topic and one he made central to America’s self-image of itself — while Wolfe wrote about an extraordinary range of topics.

For example, i...