Plenty of American writers from the second half of the 20th century still have their cults of personality. Thomas Pynchon has his shrines and shrine-keepers, Joan Didion has hers, and so on. In most cases the admiration has a canonising tendency, one that imagines its subject as distant and perfect. The admirers retell a familiar set of stories about their idols, catalogue their virtues, and employ them as cultural touchstones denoting certain sensibilities to certain people. The same goes for the cult of Tom Wolfe, great champion of the “New Journalism” and wry satirist of American mores,...…Plenty of American writers from the second half of the 20th century still have their cults of personality. Thomas Pynchon has his shrines and shrine-keepers, Joan Didion has hers, and so on. In most cases the admiration has a canonising tendency, one that imagines its subject as distant and perfect. The admirers retell a familiar set of stories about their idols, catalogue their virtues, and employ them as cultural touchstones denoting certain sensibilities to certain people. The same goes for the cult of Tom Wolfe, great champion of the “New Journalism” and wry satirist of American mores,...WW…