I'm glad he lost the powder blue

Tom Wolfe is Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters

LEWISBURG, Pa. - Internationally acclaimed author Tom Wolfe has been named this year's Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters at Bucknell University.

The annual award was established to honor and recognize an individual who represents the very highest level of achievement in fiction writing.

Wolfe will receive the award and give the talk, "An Evening with Tom Wolfe," Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Weis Center for the Performing Arts at Bucknell. The talk is open to the public without charge.

Wolfe is the author of 12 books including the best seller The Right Stuff, winner of the American Book Award for general non-fiction in 1979.

His recent novel, A Man in Full, was nominated for the National Book Award four weeks prior to publication and had an unprecedented first-run printing of 1.2 million copies.

His newest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, takes on the hallowed halls of America's modern university in a scathing assessment of higher education..

Raised in Richmond, Va., Wolfe holds his degrees from Washington and Lee University and Yale University. He worked as a reporter for The Springfield Union, The Washington Post and The New York Herald Tribune before beginning his career as a novelist with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, published in 1965.

Other national best sellers include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The Weis fellowship was established through a grant from the Degenstein Foundation in honor of Janet Weis, author, civic leader and philanthropist.

Weis is trustee emerita of Bucknell University. Her late husband, Sigfried Weis, was chair of the Bucknell Board of Trustees from 1982-88.

Bucknell President Brian C. Mitchell stated, "We are pleased to welcome Tom Wolfe to our campus, and to have him join the list of world-renowned and respected writers who have received this award, an award which is a fitting honor to the life and work of Janet Weis."

Previous recipients of the fellowship award were Toni Morrison, John Updike and Salman Rushdie.