RIP Tom Wolfe, Conservative Man Of Letters

Tom Wolfe was one of the greatest writers in American history, in the same pantheon as Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson. His books were American originals, delving into the nuances of the American psyche in ways that no one could have predicted. He died Monday. He was 87.

The Richmond, Virginia native broke ground with his New Journalism adventures like The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Trip before becoming the grand popular novelist of the 1980’s with the New York City satire The Bonfire of the Vanities (ignore the movie).

Wolfe was a hardened conservative who even defended the Vietnam War retrospectively by saying that it stopped the flow of Communism in Southeast Asia. He was sympathetic to President Bush’s Iraq War and his views never even really got him in trouble — by this time he was already too famous.

Watch his great interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson:

Watch Wolfe call Darwinism a “myth.”