Tom Wolfe has died at the ripe old age of 88. He was a big figure in the imaginations of my generation of writers — as big as Updike or Mailer (both of whom loathed him). I always think of Mailer, Wolfe and Hunter Thompson as the writers who changed the way I thought about reportage.

The NYT obituary quoted that famous observation by Joseph Epstein in The New Republic:

“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world. His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”

Most people probably remember him not for his satire — his ability to take the piss out of self-important and self-indulgent elites — but for his attire. The London Times obit (behind a paywall) claimed that he owned 40 hand-made white suits (and put a photo of him wearing one on the front page). I’ll remember him for his best book — The Right Stuff — about the pioneering flights of the Mercury astronauts. And for being one of those writers who make you think after you’ve read one of his sentences: I wish I’d written that.