HOW I ALMOST WROTE A BIOGRAPHY OF TOM WOLFE: The publishing world seems oddly uninterested in the life of The Bonfire of the Vanities author.
The agent got back to me within a week, emailing the various responses. Nonfiction editors at half a dozen big houses either didn’t like my approach, or didn’t like Tom, or didn’t like the genre of literary biography. One said, “I’m not passionate enough about Wolfe.” Another observed, “While I admire some of Wolfe’s early nonfiction, I’m not a fan of his novels.”
The agent’s email concluded: “Your thoughts?”
Well, my thoughts, my suspicions, are that the publishing industry isn’t interested in the full story of the man who wrote “A Man in Full” because he wrote too frankly, and too irreverently, about race and sex and status. Of course, every disappointed aspiring author will find reasons to blame benighted publishers, but what’s striking is the apparent lack of interest in Wolfe’s life story at all. Meanwhile, I have lately read books of varying quality on Wolfe’s contemporaries Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and Jimmy Breslin. It’s certainly odd.
And there the story would end. But nowadays writers can skip the middleman altogether and publish online. Which I have been doing weekly on Substack since May, telling my Wolfe tale in serial form. I hope that one day some enlightened publisher does put a biographer to work. Those boxes are full of treasures.
While a good meaty biography of one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century remains elusive, there’s an enjoyable, albeit far from perfect, documentary about him on Netflix: Radical Wolfe: Does the New Tom Wolfe Documentary Cover the Man in Full?