I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.

Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed the example of his professor Marshall Fishwick by enrolling in Yale University's American Studies doctoral program. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair which described the society of 19th century England. The Post's city editor was "amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill the beat every reporter wanted.

Beginning his career as a reporter he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the sixties after the publication of books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and his collections of articles and essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe Jr. His first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities released in 1987 was met with critical acclaim and was a great commercial success.