The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) is best known as a pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’ and as the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, the acclaimed and bestselling novel about 1980s Wall Street. Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia and studied at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, followed by a doctorate at Yale, before abandoning academia for a career in journalism. After several years reporting for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, his breakthrough came in the mid-1960s. Wolfe’s radical experiments with the use of literary techniques alongside ‘straight’ reporting came to typify the ‘New Journalism’ movement – most famously in The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of the emerging hippie scene in the late 1960s. Among his many awards was the National Book Foundation Medal for a Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and he continued to publish provocative non-fiction into his eighties, most recently 2016’s The Kingdom of Speech, a critique of Charles Darwin and the linguist Noam Chomsky.
Andrew Chaikin is an American author, speaker and space journalist. He was born in 1956 and grew up in New York and studied geology at Brown University. He went on to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA and was a researcher at the Smithsonian’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies before he became a science journalist in 1980. Chaikin has written numerous articles about space exploration and astronomy and is best known for his book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (1994, Folio 2021).