He eventually wrote a four-part article about the astronauts for the magazine. In 1972, he covered the launch of the final Moon mission, Apollo 17, for Rolling Stone. Wolfe’s journey into writing about human spaceflight began a year earlier. National Air and Space Museum Archives, NASM-9A11716-A This photo, taken January 20, 1961, shows Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton standing in front of a Convair F-106B-75-CO Delta Dart (r/n 59-0158). Thompson, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion) called exactly that in 1973. Indeed, Wolfe himself solidified the term “New Journalism” when he titled an edited collection of essays by himself and other writers (including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Valuing evocative truth rather than just facts, “New Journalism” involved the writer as both participant and observer, using literary techniques to draw characters, sketch settings, and arouse emotion. Likewise, Wolfe came of age as a writer at a moment in the 1960s when he helped to create a new kind of literary nonfiction. Those spacefarers shared a historic opportunity in part because, at the right moment, they were experienced enough to join the human spaceflight program without being too old or too entrenched into their military careers. in 1930, he entered the world during the same year as all three Apollo 11 astronauts. Tom Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff (1979), one of the most iconic literary books about spaceflight, died this week.īorn Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. Known as the Mercury Seven or Original Seven, they are (front row, left to right) Walter M. NASA's Project Mercury astronauts on April 9, 1959.

Thomas wolfe the right stuff