The Right Stuff appeared in Reader’s Digest and was serialized by multiple magazines. In an era when many Americans subscribed to regular book services, which provided monthly selections mailed to their homes, The Right Stuff was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Conservative Book Club, the Flying Book Club, and the Macmillan Book Club. Wolfe evocatively portrayed the places and the people who made the United States early human spaceflights happen. Instead, he wrote, “I finally got up to 450 pages and said that’s it.” Initially, he intended to write a book that would cover the entire program up to the then-current Skylab. Famously, he worked extensively with Chuck Yeager to understand the culture of test pilots and the landscapes in which they worked. Focusing on the earliest American human spaceflights of Project Mercury and writing 15 years after the events themselves, Wolfe had the benefit of hindsight, archives, and first-hand recollections. In the author’s note to The Right Stuff, he thanked the many people who he interviewed as well as the staff at the NASA history office at the Johnson Space Center. Struck by the bravery required to climb atop a loaded rocket, Wolfe started researching a broader history of the United States’ human spaceflight program. He eventually wrote a four-part article about the astronauts for the magazine.
In 1972, he covered the launch of the final Moon mission, Apollo 17, for Rolling Stone. Wolfe’s journey into writing about human spaceflight began a year earlier. Thompson, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion) called exactly that in 1973.Īuthor Tom Wolfe participates in the White House Salute to American Authors hosted by Laura Bush in the East Room Monday, March 22, 2004. Indeed, Wolfe himself solidified the term “New Journalism” when he titled an edited collection of essays by himself and other writers (including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Valuing evocative truth rather than just facts, “New Journalism” involved the writer as both participant and observer, using literary techniques to draw characters, sketch settings, and arouse emotion. Likewise, Wolfe came of age as a writer at a moment in the 1960s when he helped to create a new kind of literary nonfiction. Those spacefarers shared a historic opportunity in part because, at the right moment, they were experienced enough to join the human spaceflight program without being too old or too entrenched into their military careers.
in 1930, he entered the world during the same year as all three Apollo 11 astronauts. Tom Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff (1979), one of the most iconic literary books about spaceflight, died this week.īorn Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr.
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