Appraisal …

… The author in full: Tom Wolfe | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Though Wolfe was never the great writer he finally aspired to be, he was a first-rate social observer and chronicler — a ‘social X-ray’ in his own right — and a superb satirist whose nonfiction and essayistic works are almost unfailingly clever, witty, imaginative and skillfully written. Most important of all, he had an unerring instinct for what we might call le cible just, the perfect target: the rich limousine liberal, the fatuous, shallow, hypocritical and parasitic pseudo-intellectual and artist, and — finally — the liberal mystique itself.