Tom Wolfe

A Dickens for Our Time (75 minutes)

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With a Yale Ph.D. in hand, a young Tom Wolfe spends the summer delivering office supplies, before landing his first newspaper job. Wanting to be noticed, he soon develops the techniques of fiction to craft his reporting, publishes short works in popular magazines, and emerges as the chief spokesperson for the so-called "New Journalism".

In a candid interview with the Smithsonian's own Marc Pachter, Tom Wolfe recounts these and other key moments that progressively lead to The Purple Decades, The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and the recent A Man in Full.