The first time I heard Tom Wolfe speak in public was in 1965 or ’66. I was a student at McGill University where he had come to lecture. One line has stuck in my memory; he compared himself to the “renegade cowboy,” the character in Western movies who has lived with the Indians and who comes back to town to tell the tale. I knew Wolfe’s writing from reading him in Esquire, and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby may have been out by then. I remember From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) which came out first as an article in Harper’s (July 1981). By then I was working on minimum cost housing research, somewhat estranged from high architecture, so I had no objection to his mocking tone. I had not yet experienced the epiphany that came from writing Home, but I thought his take on the Modern “revolution” rang true. I still do. Judging from Twitter, From Bauhaus to Our House still rankles architecture critics, as it was intended to do. How could someone not admire the Seagram Building? Almost 40 years later, as Yale University spends half a billion dollars building two Gothic Revival colleges, Wolfe’s critique of Modernism seems more prescient than ever.
Tom Wolfe in 1965.
The first and only time I heard Tom Wolfe speak in public was at a book reading in Manhattan, around 2006 or ’07, where he introduced you, Mr. Rybczynski! It was a discussion of Frederick Law Olmsted, and your biography of him, though it was several years after the book’s publication.
It was a lovely evening, and Mr. Wolfe provided an excellent opening act, as it were.