On Tuesday, The Guardian published an obituary for Tom Wolfe by Stanley Reynolds, who had died in November 2016, more than seventeen months before Wolfe. Forty-nine years earlier, in May 1969, The Guardian ran Reynolds’ perceptive and sympathetic review of Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Ed Hayes “was an assistant district attorney in the homicide unit in the Bronx when he met Wolfe, who re-cast him as Tommy Killian in The Bonfire of The Vanities.” Hayes came to know Wolfe fairly closely: “He was my best friend, and he gave me my start in New York. I wanted to make him proud every day.” Wolfe’s old friend has a lively sense of humor:
We’d go out to breakfast. But he’d drive you crazy. He ate oatmeal but he was the slowest eater in the world. Finally I stopped going out to eat with him.