wolfe on weber

It turns out Tom Wolfe, the realist American novelist most famous for his Bonfire of the Vanities, is a bit of an amateur sociologist. Check out this interview with the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus in which Tom admits to falling in love with sociology.   (You can begin listening about 1/4 of the way into the interview.) During graduate school Tom became attracted to Weber’s theorizing of status, a concept that later figured prominently in many of Wolfe’s novels, especially in Bonfire.  In the last half of the interview Wolfe describes how he carefully builds status markers into his novels.