Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 6, 2000

Volume 29, Number 5

Tom Wolfe

Author Tom Wolfe to recount his days at Yale

Best-selling novelist and social commentator Tom Wolfe will speak about his life as a graduate student at Yale on Wednesday, Oct. 11, at 4 p.m. in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall St.

Wolfe's talk is titled "Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks: Confessions of a Yale Graduate Student." Wolfe is the first speaker in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' Tercentennial Lecture Series, "In the Company of Scholars." His talk is free and open to the public.

Wolfe earned his Ph.D. in American studies at Yale in 1957 and has continued to explore and comment on contemporary trends in the United States ever since. His writing has been called "wildly entertaining ... with an energy and irony all his own."

Wolfe worked as a reporter for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune. His books of social commentary include "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" (1965), "The Pump House Gang" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (both 1968).

"Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987) -- Wolfe's first novel -- was a best seller, and his second novel, "A Man in Full" (1998), earned critical acclaim. "The Right Stuff" (1979), a study of the first generation of American astronauts, won the American Book Award for general nonfiction and the Columbia Journalism Award. Wolfe explored the world of modern art in his controversial book, "The Painted Word" (1975), and considered the social and intellectual fashions that influence contemporary architecture in "From Bauhaus to Our House" (1981). A collection of his short fiction and essays titled "Hooking Up" is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Tercentennial Lecture Series will feature five distinguished alumni of the Graduate School. The next speaker will be graphic designer and Yale professor emeritus of political science Edward Tufte (Ph.D. 1968), who will give a talk on "Visual Explanations" on Nov. 15. The series will also feature Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy (Ph.D., 1968) on Feb. 2; Robert Birgeneau (Ph.D., 1966), president of the University of Toronto, on April 6; and Yale Corporation member and economist Janet Yellen (Ph.D., 1971) on Oct. 4, 2001.

A reception in the Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York St., will follow each lecture.

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