Authors Like Tom Wolfe

Talese and Wolfe were writing for the same magazine in the same years, and Wolfe put Talese's profile of Joshua Logan in The New Journalism. They share the conviction that a subject reveals itself in scenes, not quotes. The difference is temperament: Wolfe announces the status detail with three exclamation marks, Talese lets it sit quietly in the corner of the room until you notice it.

In Cold Blood appeared just as Wolfe was making the case that reporting could do everything a novel does, and an excerpt opens his anthology. Both build true stories out of scenes, dialogue and point of view. But Capote is cold and controlled where Wolfe is loud and satirical, and he disappears into his subjects instead of performing above them. Read him for the other way the method can sound — and for the arguments about accuracy it has never escaped.

The same movement, the opposite voice. Didion uses Wolfe's tools — the scene, the telling detail, the writer's own eye — but her sentences are spare and her subject is often her own unease rather than other people's status games. Reading the two together shows how wide New Journalism could stretch.

Wolfe's great rival in the same arena. Both wanted the big American subject and both treated the reporter's ego as part of the story; Wolfe watched from the edge of the room in a white suit, Mailer walked into the middle and got arrested. When Mailer attacked A Man in Full in print, Wolfe answered back, which tells you how close the two were standing.

If it is Wolfe's exclamatory energy you love, Thompson takes it further and somewhere darker. Wolfe included two of his pieces in The New Journalism, and the two are the movement's opposite poles: Wolfe always in command of the sentence, Thompson surrendering to the chaos he was meant to be reporting. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Fear and Loathing make a natural pair.

The method Wolfe championed, taken to the subject where it matters most. Herr shares Wolfe's ear for slang and his belief that a subjective, literary account can be truer than straight reporting, but there is no satire left in Dispatches. Read it after The Right Stuff: another book about young men and the machinery of risk, without the glamour.

The closest novel to The Bonfire of the Vanities, and a deliberate echo: Bateman works at Pierce & Pierce, the same fictional firm as Wolfe's bond salesman Sherman McCoy. Both books catalogue the brands, the restaurants and the rankings of 1980s Manhattan money. Wolfe still believes in comic justice; Ellis drains out the comedy and leaves the catalogue, which is far colder and far more violent.

Liar's Poker is the nonfiction twin of The Bonfire of the Vanities: the same mid-1980s bond desk, the same young men convinced they run the world, reported from the trading floor rather than imagined from outside. Lewis inherited Wolfe's gift for making a closed tribe and its slang comic and legible to outsiders, with less of the moralising.

Wolfe argued that the novel should go back to the social realism of the nineteenth century, and Wharton is that tradition's great New York practitioner. She reads the same signals Wolfe does — the address, the invitation, who is seen with whom — with a quieter, more merciless exactness. The House of Mirth is the Bonfire of 1905: a social fall, watched in detail.

For readers who loved the scale of A Man in Full and want another novelist who takes on the whole country at once. DeLillo shares Wolfe's fascination with the surfaces of American life — brands, media, crowds — but treats them with dread rather than glee, in prose that is restrained where Wolfe's is maximal.