Joe Mysak

1 week ago | letsgoforabeer.substack.com | Joe Mysak

Now before we go any further -- to Yale -- I’d just like to lay out for a moment and for future biographers or journalistic or literary historians or just plain fans a little homage to a series of articles that periodically attempted to sum up Tom Wolfe for their readers. You can go back and just marvel at these portraits, most done before the Internet eased our access to everything.

1 week ago | letsgoforabeer.substack.com | Joe Mysak

In the summer 1950 edition of the Washington & Lee literary magazine, Shenandoah, Volume 1, Number 2, there is a story by T.K. Wolfe, Jr. entitled ``The Ace of Spades Is Black.’’ It’s about a man and a woman on a bus going through the mountains, and told through rapidly shifting points of view, now his, now hers, a technique the author later employs in almost all of his ``New Journalism.’’ Tom has taken that bus many times to and from Richmond.

2 weeks ago | letsgoforabeer.substack.com | Joe Mysak

``I was a pitcher,’’ Tom tells the Washington & Lee oral historian about playing Varsity baseball at college. ``At that time I had the American male disease, which is the abnormal and inflamed desire to become a sports star, and if I could have become one, I don’t think I’d ever have written a word. If I could have played Major League baseball, who cares about writing?’’Tom tells me, ``I first became interested in baseball because that was the way you won applause.

2 weeks ago | letsgoforabeer.substack.com | Joe Mysak

It is almost impossible to conceive in today’s hothouse/madhouse college placement atmosphere, but there is a time when students aren’t consumed with getting into the college of their choice. Today, certain children spend their entire junior years, and maybe even part of their sophomore, in a state of extreme and soul-crushing anxiety about Where They Will Go and If They Will Be Accepted.

3 weeks ago | letsgoforabeer.substack.com | Joe Mysak

He is a very good student. Education looms large in any consideration of Tom Wolfe. You have to keep in mind that Tom’s Plan, as he describes it on a number of occasions, is to become an academic and also to write books, presumably histories and biographies. He puts in five years getting a doctorate, yet in the end doesn’t use it for the purpose for which it is intended, which is to go on in academia. For someone whose reputation is as a popular writer, he never speaks down to his readers.