"What inna namea christ is this?" The origins of Tom Wolfe's journalistic voice

Tom Wolfe has one of the most distinctive journalistic voices in the history of the media, as several obituaries of him noted after his death in May 2018 at the age of eighty-eight. He is famous not only for his idiosyncratic, exuberant use of punctuation but for what one commentator has called his “wake-the-dead” prose style. The question of where this distinctive voice came from has received limited attention from scholars. Wolfe has provided his own “origin story” that locates it in 1963 when he was struggling to overcome writer’s block on a piece about custom cars and, as this is an interesting story artfully told by a masterly self-promoter, it has been accepted by and large. The New York Public Library’s acquisition of Wolfe’s papers gives researchers the opportunity to examine the origins of Wolfe’s journalistic voice—and much more besides—and this article traces the antecedents to compositions for high school and a sports column for a college newspaper. Equally important, Wolfe, for his doctoral dissertation, experimented with a voice and narrative approach that prefigured what became known as the New Journalism but met with his examiners’ disapproval.