The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby - by Tom Wolfe (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tom Wolfe's first book of essays, which collects stories from corners of 1960s America that few had described before, from the burgeoning glamor of Las Vega to a close-up look at the working lives of New York City doormen"--

Book Synopsis

"An excellent book by a genius." --Kurt Vonnegut

A generation-defining portrait of the 1960s by the master of New Journalism.

Tom Wolfe raised the banner for his high-octane brand of New Journalism with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his first book of essays, which collects stories from corners of 1960s America that few had described before. With a thrilling flair for detail, Wolfe creates an indelible portrait of the era--from the burgeoning ersatz glamor of Las Vegas, to the hot-rodding world of car customizers, to a close-up look at the working lives of New York City doormen.

These essays are a testament to Wolfe's unparalleled ability to capture the zeitgeist on the page, bringing it to life with colorful and unusual characters and an inimitable ear for a new kind of American idiom. The force and depth of his writing endures decades after his debut, reaffirming, yet again, his role as a foundational figure in the development of a truly American school of language and journalism.

Review Quotes

"Might well be required reading in courses with names like American studies." --Time Magazine

"I'm always rereading Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." --David Gates

"Tom Wolfe is a terrific writer." --The Washington Monthly

"Wolfe can do things with words and settings that few writers are capable of matching." --Tom Walker, The Denver Post

"The man's done the impossible. He--Yes!--understands America!" --Houston Chronicle

"His eye and ear for detailed observation are incomparable; and observation is to the satirist what bullets are to a gun." --The Boston Sunday Globe

About the Author

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of more than a dozen books, including such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He is credited with coining the term "the Me Decade." Among his many honors, he was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.