The essential collection of Tom Wolfeâs writing on a turning-point era in modern American culture.
The Purple Decades brings together the author's selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play.
It was in the 1960s and 1970sâthose âpurple decadesââthat 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.
Wolfeâs 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. Wolfeâs contributions to the language of the purple decades range from the phrases âthe right stuffâ to âradical chic,â 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 âthe Me Decade,â as the 1970s were dubbed as soon as Wolfeâs essay âThe Me Decade and the Third Great Awakeningâ appeared in 1976. The complete texts of âThe Last American Heroâ and âThe Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,â and long sections of âRadical Chicâ and The Right Stuff, are included here in The Purple Decades.
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 Wolfeâs first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965, Newsweek predicted: âThis 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.â In these pages the falcon flies with big talons, and an even bigger grin, across the first two decades of Tom Wolfeâs literary career.