Wolfe has always excelled at these, going back to his justly legendary Junior Johnson profile for Esquire, but for my money his best ones are in The Right Stuff: The bravura opening chapter, with the test-pilot wives waiting in terror for the uniformed man to come up their front walk, and the little Indians marching out in their bridge coats to attend the funeral of an Indian who just didn't have the right stuff Wolfe's explanation for how every airline pilot in America acquired the 'West Virginia poker-hollow drawl' of Chuck Yeager and, above all, the book's greatest glory, the moment-by-moment account of the astronauts' triumphal entry into Houston on July 4, 1962, an event that culminated in an enormous barbeque in the Houston Coliseum presided over by the aged stripper Sally Rand, who 'shook her ancient haunches at the seven single-combat warriors. Last month I read it again and had precisely the same response.įirst, there are the set pieces. Soon after The Right Stuff was published, I read it in a state of constant stunned awe at its Electric Kool-Aid Acid prose, of course, but also in deep admiration for the acuity with which it made sense of an extraordinary moment in American history. This seemed very odd to me: Shouldn't The First American in Space be a title of great honor? It was only years later, when I read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, that I came to understand the complex national pathologies - the multi-front competition with the Soviet Union, the problem of knowing who your celebrated gladiators might be as long as your war stays Cold - that had produced the idolization of Glenn and the (comparative) marginalization of Shepard.

I am sure that that was a painful discovery, but once I learned the name Alan Shepard I treasured it, in part because he spelled his first name just as I spelled mine, and in part because hardly anyone else seemed to know who he was. I knew this for some years, and cannot now remember when I discovered that John Glenn was not even the first American in space, much less the first human. This much I did know: whichever John was the astronaut, he was the first man in space.

The right stuff novel