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The Write Stuff vs. the Right Stuff
How Tom Wolfe and Chuck Yeager pushed the envelope
Author Tom Wolfe wrote about a human quality he called “The Right Stuff.” The ability to man-up, to push the envelope, to combine a sense of mission and accomplishment with a sense of self and to explode into the universe on top of a flaming ball of rocket fuel. Wolfe depicted American heroes such as test pilot ace Chuck Yeager and the Mercury 7 astronauts as those who possessed that “righteous stuff,” and then some.
Wolfe also wielded this quality with writing full of bravado, run-on sentences, stream-of-consciousness and a detailed “fly on the wall” approach to reporting, which populated his take on what he named “The New Journalism” of the 1970s, ’80s and beyond. Wolfe’s style still fascinates me and certainly captivated my students during the decade I taught his take on American manned space flight: The Right Stuff.
I was thinking about Tom Wolfe a lot in mid-November, after a former colleague sent me a photo of a few books from my class set of The Right Stuff. Because I often was the only person on the English 11 “team” who taught this ageless account of the Space Race, I wrote my name and classroom number inside the books I kept in Room 215. That way, when I assigned the text and kids invariably lost their copies, Mr. Wolfe and his words would…
