Tom Wolfe is recognized around the world as the pre-eminent social commentator of our time. For over three decades he has chronicled and forecast American culture with a wit and insight that eludes most futurists. His runaway best seller The Bonfire of the Vanities stands as a brilliant evocation of both the peculiar class structure and politics of New York City, and the economic excesses of the 1980s. His recent novel, A Man in Full, received both outstanding critical and popular success. Hailed by Time and The Wall Street Journal as even better than its phenomenally successful predecessor, it had an unprecedented first-run printing of 1.2 million copies and was nominated for the National Book Award four weeks prior to publication. As Newsweek states, "no writer, reporter or novelist, is getting our world on paper better than Tom Wolfe."

Wolfe's newest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, takes on the hallowed halls of America's modern university, from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating, plus race, class, sex and basketball. When beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons arrives at Dupont University, she finds that sex, drugs and kegs trump academic achievement every time. A scathing assessment of our nation's higher education, I Am Charlotte Simmons tackles some of the most pressing issues of our time.

One of the most requested speakers in the nation, Wolfe has delighted some of the world's most prestigious corporations, associations and universities. With his current lecture program he delivers a tour-de-force assessment of our society's cultural mind-set.

Called the father of "New Journalism," Wolfe is the author of twelve books, including the national best sellers The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

His first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, was published in 1965. Other books include The Pump House Gang, The Painted Word (an incandescent, hilarious look at the world of modern art), Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, In Our Times (Wolfe's first collection of drawings), From Bauhaus to Our House (his distinctive look at contemporary architecture), The Purple Decades: A Reader and Ambush at Fort Bragg, a novella released on audiotape.

In 1979, Wolfe won the American Book Award for general non-fiction for The Right Stuff. He was named recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for 1980 by The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and received the Columbia Journalism Award for distinguished service in the field of journalism that same year.

Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Wolfe received his bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University, and his doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. Afterward, he went to work as a reporter for The Springfield Union (in Massachusetts), The Washington Post and The New York Herald Tribune, where he first began to push the envelope of conventional journalistic license. Since then, his writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Harper's.