When I met Tom Wolfe at a writers' conference at University of Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1977, I told him I was a great admirer of the kind of writing that he practiced and perhaps invented, which he called New Journalism.

Wolfe and I had a brief quiet conversation in the dining room. Wolfe was wearing one of the counter-cultural-straight-man painstakingly tailored pastel suits he always wore, even in the midst of the 70s, even when he was researching The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test with the tie-dyed, fringed, long-haired bell-bottom-jeans-wearing freaks on that psychedelic bus.

The night I met him, I was surprised that the wide-lapeled suit he wore was pale yellow. I fingered his lapel thoughtfully, to check the quality of the fabric, since I read where he’d written about how much he was into well-tailored fine fabrics, decided the material was linen, noticed his pocket handkerchief was made of silk, and then I told him I wanted to be a famous writer. And he said without a pause, You will be. For no apparent reason at all.