Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Tom Wolfe prefers not to think about his place in literary history, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. As the dapper chronicler of the American scene nears the end of his eighth decade, he is busy working on a new novel. Meanwhile, his publisher is busy rolling out handsome new paperback editions of 10 of his previous books. Asked which of them he expects might be widely read a century from now, the author of The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities refuses to play along. It’s “folly for a novelist to think about immortality,” he says. “I’m sure Zola and Dickens never thought about it for a moment.” His idols knew, he says, that “the first duty of any writer, particularly a novelist, is to entertain.”

Wolfe’s next book, due next year, will nonetheless be issue-oriented, said Steve Heilig in the San Francisco Chronicle. Set in Miami, Back to Blood will offer readers Wolfe’s take on immigration. “Ten years ago when I would tell people I was interested in this topic, they would say, ‘Oh, how interesting,’ and then fall asleep like a horse, standing up,” he says. “It’s good stuff now.” One thing Wolfe’s fans can count on is that the new novel will not be pitched to the imagined tastes of 22nd-century readers. “That’s a fatal way for a writer to think,” he says. “In fact, the books and plays that have survived are for the most part specific to the period in which they were written.”