I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel

Charlotte Simmons arrives in the storied halls of Dupont University a brilliant, beautiful, but benighted outsider from North Carolina, struck by the eminence of its reputation, its august towers, and most of all the dizzying and seductive social hierarchies of this strange new world.

Tom Wolfe made—and then broke—the mold with this gimlet-eyed portrait of the elite American college campus as a riotous testing ground for young ambition, fledgling politics, and wars over questions around gender, power, society, and much more. As Charlotte navigates the traps and pitfalls of life on Dupont, the reader is led through a skewering and revelatory exploration of where the upper crust cut their teeth and the nation’s battling agendas first learn to do war.

The now-infamous cast of characters of this high-stakes sentimental education include Beverly, Charlotte’s lacrosse-player-chasing roommate; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont’s revered basketball team, whose eminence is threatened by a brilliant Black freshman; Hoyt Thomas, the ambitious Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, whose skyward social trajectory gets a powder keg boost when he inadvertently gets into a brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university’s “independent” newspaper and see themselves as a beacon of sanity and balance on Dupont’s sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus. We follow as Charlotte’s ingenuousness and outsider’s naivete transform into a heady awareness of the intoxicating allure of her own innocence.

With his legendary wit, high-octane prose, and relentless eye for telling detail, Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons created a portrait of American college life at the dawn of the young century that still vibrates with life and relevance.