Tom Wolfe’s point of view proved unique among magazine writers, Andrew Ferguson says, because Wolfe wasn’t a man of the left:
Like most writers with a wide range and a fine eye, Wolfe had no interest in cultivating an ideology. Instead he actually fit the image that so many other journalists maintain of themselves, in fantasy if not in fact: an unrutted, unconventional speaker of truth to power. Immune to liberal piety, Wolfe could see the cultural imbecilities that were hiding in plain sight; he could hear the background noise that his colleagues took for granted. Not many of them would have seen material in the party that Leonard Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers in his Upper East Side duplex: a celebrity raising money for a good cause — happens all the time! Wolfe saw that the moment encapsulated a particular corruption in American liberalism, which was substituting moral self-congratulation for an unblinkered view of the world. Wolfe got the story that others missed and wrote it up as the great Radical Chic, as funny and germane today as it was in 1970.
He followed it with still more inconvenient revelations: long essays on the self-hypnosis that leads culture mavens to ignore the absurdity of the contemporary art world (The Painted Word) or the ugliness of modernist architecture (From Bauhaus to Our House). He wrote a primer for college students, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” imploring them to withstand academic ideology and believe “the heresy of your own eyes” — a nice phrase for Wolfe’s own approach. The mavens roared.
“All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, arts, and journalism and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else,” he once told an interviewer. “With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all.”
It resulted in a catalogue of books and essays unrivaled in journalism for its prescience, humor, and fearlessness — an achievement that earned Wolfe a place in the pantheon before he wrote a word of novel.