Famed author and journalist Tom Wolfe dead at 88

Tom Wolfe, the critically acclaimed, bestselling journalist and novelist behind “The Right Stuff” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday at the age of 88. 

The longtime New Yorker died after being hospitalized for an infection, The New York Times confirmed with his agent. 

{mosads}Wolfe, who began his career as a newspaper reporter in the 1960s, was a founding thinker of the “New Journalism” movement that blended literary style and subjective point of view into reporting. 

One of the 20th century’s most influential pop culture writers, Wolfe chronicled the burgeoning counterculture movement of the ’60s in books including “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

He went on to coin such iconic phrases as “radical chic,” “the Me Decade” and “The Right Stuff,” after his nonfiction account of the first American astronauts and Project Mercury.

Wolfe, famous for his signature ivory bespoke suits, also penned a slew of influential essays for New York magazine and Esquire, often focusing on media and literature.

In 1987, Wolfe released his first novel, the hugely successful “Bonfire of the Vanities,” a satire of greed, politics and racism backdropped by the hyper-consumption of 1980s New York. It was followed by three other novels: “A Man in Full,” “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and “Back to Blood.”

He is survived by his wife Sheila Wolfe and children Tommy and Alexandra.