The Purple Decades Audiobook By Tom Wolfe cover art

The Purple Decades

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The Purple Decades

By: Tom Wolfe
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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About this listen

Before he became a best-selling novelist (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Tom Wolfe was an essayist and keen observer of 1960s and 1970s culture for Esquire and Rolling Stone. (This is the man who coined the phrase "Me Decade", after all.) This ear-candy collection of 20 essays and articles narrated by Edoardo Ballerini was handpicked by Wolfe and includes some of his best-known nonfiction work. These must-listens include profiles of astronaut Chuck Yeager (who also appears in Wolfe’s The Right Stuff) and model-turned-Warhol-superstar Baby Jane Holzer. Part cultural anthropologist and part social observer, Wolfe conquers the worlds of modern art, high fashion, surfing, and stock-car racing with equal aplomb.

©1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1975, 1976, 1981, 1982 Tom Wolfe (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Essays Literary History & Criticism Political Science United States Nonfiction

Our favorite moments from The Purple Decades

It’s a sign of the social thing in the art world
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The only name of the game in New York
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Fifth Avenue guts!
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…that’s what started Pop Art.
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  • The Purple Decades
  • It’s a sign of the social thing in the art world
  • The Purple Decades
  • The only name of the game in New York
  • The Purple Decades
  • Fifth Avenue guts!
  • The Purple Decades
  • …that’s what started Pop Art.
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The Purple Decades safely sticks to what one might call Tom Wolfe’s Greatest Hits: his famous profiles of Baby Jane Holzer and racecar driver Junior Johnson, his explorations of 'radical chic,' 'the Right Stuff,' and 'the Me Decade,' and highlights from his recent sprees on the absurd excesses of art-think.

- The New York Review of Books
Tom Wolfe

About the Author

Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Tom Wolfe is perhaps best known for his work as a trailblazer in the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and as the author of searing best-sellers such as The Bonfire of the Vanities. Originally a reporter, Wolfe worked in news for ten years, writing for publications including The New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post. In 1965, Wolfe published his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of essays about the freewheeling 1960s, launching him into the public sphere as a whip-smart and madly inventive cultural critic. Several best-selling nonfiction publications followed, including The Right Stuff, The Pump House Gang, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, works that introduced popular slang—including statusphere, the right stuff, The Me Decade, and good ol’ boy—into the English lexicon.

Wolfe released his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 1987 to much praise; the book remained on The New York Times best-seller list for over a year after its initial publication. Three of his books have been adapted into blockbuster films including The Last American Hero (1973), The Right Stuff (1983), and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Wolfe was also the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the National Book Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A writer with a keen eye for style and all things sensational, Wolfe was known for not only his attention-grabbing writing but also his eye-catching fashion sense—he wore his trademark white suit for decades, donning his ivory tie and matching fedora no matter the season. He died in 2018 in New York City, leaving behind a legacy of deft, neon prose and razor-sharp satire.

Edoardo Ballerini

About the Performer

Edoardo Ballerini has narrated over 250 audiobooks and appeared in over 50 films and television series, including The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. His 2013 recording of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was named Audible’s Audiobook of the Year and earned him the Audie Award for Best Solo Narration. He won a second Audie Award for Best Male Narrator, for his reading of Dean Koontz’s Watchers in 2019. He recently completed work on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which has garnered international acclaim. He lives in New York.

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Spite in short-story form

Slice-in-time recounting of past decades by a mean-spirited little man who, apparently, hated everyone.

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