Astronaut remembers Tom Wolfe ~ Scott Kelly on writing

Novelist Tom Wolfe, brilliant writer has died. 
Among my favorite books, "Bonfire of the Vanities"* ranks up there with Gone With the Wind, in my opinion.  Wolfe's imaginative and creative plot, describing the role reversals in a racially charged incident, will endure a lasting literary legacy.  Moreover, his unique writing style inspired many, including me, although, without any hope of achieving his stellar intellectual heights.  

Thomas Wolfe ~ writer, journalist (1930-2018)

Astronaut Scott Kelly shares my opinion and he was fortunate enough to tell Tom Wolfe about the influence he had on him, in person.  Time Magazine published Astronaut Kelly's posthumous memory.

The New York Times reports: Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

Scott Kelly wrote the Time Magazine obituary:

Tom Wolfe: A writer who made reality remarkable

Kelly is an engineer, a U.S. Navy captain, former military fighter pilot and test pilot, and a retired astronaut; Kelly has also commanded the International Space Station and set the record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space.

The day I walked out of a bookstore with Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, I’d only meant to buy some gum. But there it was, on the shelf, and it looked interesting, so I took my gum money and bought the book. As I lay on my unmade college dorm bed reading about the pilots who became the first U.S. astronauts, I discovered something I’d never had: an ambition. In his great works of fiction and nonfiction, Wolfe — who died at 88 on May 14 — made you feel as if you were there in the moment. 

Indeed, the characters in The Bonfire of the Vanities seemed like real people in New York City, and The Right Stuff made me want to be like those test pilots. About 18 years after that day at the store, I made my first spaceflight.

In 2016, I sent Mr. Wolfe a photo of myself holding The Right Stuff and floating in a module at the International Space Station, and he responded the same day, in very Tom Wolfe fashion, with made-up words and outrageous punctuation. “At last I can point with extravagant pride at what I have done for the USA,” he wrote. After I got back to Earth, we had lunch at the Carlyle Hotel, in a corner booth. He showed up with his white three-piece suit and a cane with a wolf on top. I was starting to write a book myself, so I asked him how he did it. “What do you mean?” he said. “I use a pencil.”

Kelly, is a TIME 100 designee, and a retired NASA astronaut, former commander of the International Space Station and the author of Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery.

* Bonfire of the Vanities: Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987, after extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York, during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.

The action jumps back and forth from Park Avenue to Wall Street to the terrifying holding pens in Bronx Criminal Court, after the Yale-educated bond trader Sherman McCoy (a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”) becomes lost in the Bronx at night in his Mercedes with his foxy young mistress, Maria. 

After the car, with Maria at the wheel, runs over a black man and nearly ignites a race riot, Sherman enters the nightmare world of the criminal justice system.  Racial bigotry in reverse becomes the theme ~ (Controversial subject that will transcend literary time.)