I Am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe sets his sights on the American college campus in this repackaged and reissued classic with a new cover from Seymour Chwast and an introduction from Merve Emre.

Charlotte Simmons arrives in the storied halls of Dupont University a brilliant, beautiful, but benighted outsider from North Carolina, struck by the eminence of its reputation, its august towers, and most of all the dizzying and seductive social hierarchies of this strange new world.

Tom Wolfe made--and then broke--the mold with this gimlet-eyed portrait of the elite American college campus as a riotous testing ground for young ambition, fledgling politics, and wars over questions around gender, power, society, and much more. As Charlotte navigates the traps and pitfalls of life on Dupont, the reader is led through a skewering and revelatory exploration of where the upper crust cut their teeth and the nation's battling agendas first learn to do war.

The now-infamous cast of characters of this high-stakes sentimental education include Beverly, Charlotte's lacrosse-player-chasing roommate; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's revered basketball team, whose eminence is threatened by a brilliant Black freshman; Hoyt Thomas, the ambitious Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, whose skyward social trajectory gets a powder keg boost when he inadvertently gets into a brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and see themselves as a beacon of sanity and balance on Dupont's sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus. We follow as Charlotte's ingenuousness and outsider's naivete transform into a heady awareness of the intoxicating allure of her own innocence.

With his legendary wit, high-octane prose, and relentless eye for telling detail, Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons created a portrait of American college life at the dawn of the young century that still vibrates with life and relevance.

"Our pre-eminent social realist...trains his all-seeing eye on the institution of the American university. . . . Wolfe's rhapsodic prose style finds its perfect target in academia's beer-soaked bacchanals." --Henry Alford, Newsday

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. . . . A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel." --Lev Grossman, Time

"Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his...attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of slang dialogue, and that biting satire." --Steve Garbarino, New York Post

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"[A] hilarious, exclamation-point filled novel." --John Freeman, Time Out New York

"Brilliant . . . I couldn't stop reading it. . . . Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"A lot of fun . . . Hilarious." --Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Tom Wolfe remains a peerless satirist. Alone among our fiction writers he is actively writing the human comedy, American-style, on a grand Dickensian scale." --David Lehman, Bloomberg News

"Scathingly clear-eyed, often very funny take on college life." --Robert Siegel, NPR, All Things Considered

"Dazzingly vivid . . . Tom Wolfe has served up another of his broadly entertaining novels." --Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"His most fully realized and hands-down funniest work of fiction." --Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

"Captivating . . . Sit back and enjoy the ride." --Tom Walker, The Denver Post

"Tom Wolfe is America's greatest living novelist." --Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard

"Rollicking . . . Just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms or The Great Gatsby, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years. . . . Professors like to complain that they get a year older every fall, while students always remain the same. Add I Am Charlotte Simmons to that magic circle of campus phenomena unlikely to age." --Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of more than a dozen books, including such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He is credited with coining the term "the Me Decade." Among his many honors, he was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

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