Tom Wolfe death: Influential US author of 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' dies at 87

The experimental author wrote extensively about LSD, though never partook himself

(Getty)

Tom Wolfe, journalist, author and one of the pioneers of the New Journalism literary movement, has died aged 87.

He was best known for his debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was subsequently made into a feature film by Brian De Palma, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of a band of hippies who travelled across the US doing LSD in a psychedelically painted school bus called Further.

He also authored two idiosyncratically titled collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Wolfe died where he lived for more than 50 years, New York City. His death was confirmed to the New York Times by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Wolfe had been hospitalised with an infection.

Though experiments with acid featured heavily in his work, the writer, known for his resplendent white suits, never took LSD himself.

“I probably have given that impression in the past, but I didn’t,” he told The Telegraph in 2016. “I felt it was really far too dangerous to take a chance – and they didn’t try to pressure me.”

It seemed for Wolfe that using psychedelic drugs as a creative aid simply wasn’t necessary. He naturally skewed experimental.

“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” The New Republic once wrote of Wolfe. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”