A revealing portrait of the cultural giant who transformed American letters.

But what was he really like?

That's the question Tom Wolfe—chronicler of American life through legendary works like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full—wanted biographers to answer. In this buoyant book-length study of the man, Joe Mysak, who first met Wolfe in 1977, obliges.

Mysak shows us a Wolfe who was an assassin on the page yet prized politeness and manners. A Wolfe who was a caustic critic of the culturati yet was wildly ambitious and obsessed with status. A Wolfe whose stylistic innovations disrupted an entire era of American literature yet was accused of being a reactionary by many of his peers.

Drawing from the 236 boxes of Wolfe material in the New York Public Library, interviews with dozens of family members, friends, and acquaintances, and his personal relationship with his subject, Mysak skillfully traces Wolfe's eventful life. From his youth in Richmond, Virginia, to his hitherto unknown years in graduate school at Yale, to his newspaper apprenticeship, to his takeover of the magazine world, to his popular success as a historian and novelist, Mysak gives us a portrait of Wolfe that is as revealing as it is recognizable.