Tom Wolfe's Washington Post

A shopkeeper flashed a smile "you could hang the wash on."

Neighborhood gossip ran "free as the back-wash from a pig train to Secaucus."

Another indispensable element in the Wolfe arsenal -- sarcasm -- also made frequent appearances:

Washington was "the city where everybody represents somebody else."

"Rome now makes half as many movies as Hollywood, and every other one is about a prostitute."

A 1959 article previewed a visit from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev: "All of striped-pantsdom will await the moment with the anguish of a man deciding between two forks at dinner. The question is, should Khruschev get a 19-gun salute or the full 21?

"The big blast, theoretically, goes only to a bonafide 'chief of state,' like Queen Elizabeth. The 19 are for a 'head of government.' With Marxist-Leninist modesty, Khruschev is officially only the latter -- but suppose he counts the cannon blasts and doesn't like it?"

Wolfe soon began experimenting with other innovative devices. One was antonomasia, the usually derisive practice of describing an individual by a certain characteristic, then making it into a proper noun.

Thus Wolfe depicted the gunman in a botched liquor store robbery as "slightly built and snappy-talking." Seven paragraphs later: "Turner retreated but now the truck pulled up. Snappytalk opened fire."

At a reunion of Vice President Richard M. Nixon's World War II buddies, Wolfe reported Nixon's opening punch line, "I'm outranked here," then noted drolly: "Junior Operations Officer Nixon had done well enough in the meantime to be the center, for an hour last night, of an incessant round of handshakes, photographs, autographs, and of course, old war stories."