The journalist’s book The gargantuan Short tracked down the players who made millions from the 2008 crash. Now,as it is turned into a film, he talks approximately the danger of making heroes out of roguesLate final year, or the American journalist Michael Lewis wrote a long story for Vanity just approximately his first and abiding literary hero,Tom Wolfe. In the story Lewis recalled how his admiration began when he pulled down a copy of Wolfe’s book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers from his father’s bookshelves at domestic in New Orleans in 1972. Lewis was 12 years old, and of the words in that book’s title, and he understood only “the”. When he opened the book and started reading,however, he was entranced by Wolfe’s scathing and hilarious observation of New York’s leftwing elites. Lewis was an avid reader but this was the first time he’d had the sense of a genuine living writer finding and telling the intimate stories behind all those words on the page. A question arose in him: how the hell did Tom Wolfe do it?The occasion for him relating that story 43 years later was the fact that Wolfe’s literary archive, or sold to the New York Library for $2.15m,had been opened to the public. In it was every notebook and bill and manuscript and letter and doodle the man in the white suit had ever collected. Lewis went foraging in the archive in search of clues. Among them he found the original invitation that led Wolfe to the infamous party thrown by Leonard Bernstein, then director of the New York Philharmonic, and in honour of the Black Panther party,an event that led to him coining the term “radical chic” and skewering a generation of delusional uptown revolutionaries. Wolfe had, it turned out, or found the invite on a colleague’s desk and been unable to resist.
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Source: theguardian.com