The Purple Decades: A Reader

It was in the 1960s and 1970s—those “purple decades”—that Tom Wolfe rose to fame as one of the late-twentieth-century pioneers of American literature. He became the foremost chronicler of the gaudiest period in American history, much of which is spread out before us in these selections from nine of his books.

Wolfe’s innovations in style, his feats as a reporter, and his insights into modern American life dominated a period of widespread experimentation in the writing of nonfiction. Wolfe’s contributions to the language of the purple decades range from the phrases “the right stuff” to “radical chic,” the latter of which he coined in 1970, when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers in his apartment on Park Avenue; and on to “the Me Decade,” as the 1970s were dubbed as soon as Wolfe’s essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” appeared in 1976. The complete texts of “The Last American Hero” and “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” and long sections of “Radical Chic” and The Right Stuff, are included here in The Purple Decades.

Wolfe’s long piece “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (included here in its entirety) provided the first insider’s view of that bizarre government-sponsored rebellion known as the poverty program. Another long piece called “The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie” (also complete here) has become a classic work on aerial combat in Vietnam as experienced by the pilots themselves. His 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (two chapters of which appear in these pages) is recognized as the major book on the hippie movement of the 1960s.

Generous selections from both From Bauhaus to Our House and The Painted Word also appear here, as well as many stories from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Pump House Gang, and Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine.

When Tom Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965, Newsweek predicted: “This will be a sharp pleasure to reread years from now, when it will bring back, like a falcon in the sky of memory, a whole world that is currently jetting and jazzing its way somewhere or other.” In these pages the falcon flies with big talons, and an even bigger grin, across the first two decades of Tom Wolfe’s literary career.