Tom Wolfe's Washington Post

The ungrammatical use of ellipses to convey a pause or . . . inner doubt . . . or maybe just an internal aside . . . was a practice Wolfe later made a hallmark. He experimented with this technique for the first time in 1960, in a story headlined "Canine Exhibitor Finds People 'Look Like Dogs' ":

"Mrs. White could have gone on . . . about the tweedy, not to say shaggy, types who show the sheep dogs, for example . . . but she wanted to point out one exception to the rule. 'You aren't likely to find someone who looks like his Great Dane,' she said."

Eighteen months later, in an article about record-high temperatures: "Everybody knows the age-old, infallible signs of spring -- the old man lifts his eyes from the Sunday paper and trundles outside to hose down the family car . . . the kids slither down off the TV hassocks and out into the grass to listen to their transistors . . . the usual."

The assumption of another individual's point of view was an integral feature of the nascent New Journalism. In a piece bylined "By Caroline Kennedy/As Told to Thomas Wolfe," the author recorded the presidential toddler's first entrance into the White House in February 1961:

"So you really want to know how I like my new house?

"Well, the house is -- you know, it's just a house. The thing that broke me up was this snowman. We all drove up -- Mother, Daddy and me and my little brother John and, you know, the usual herd tagging along -- we all drove up from the airport and here was this big snowman in the front yard with a pink carrot for a nose and a red ribbon around the neck.

[ . . .] But getting back to the snowman . . . there was one lovely touch. He was wearing a big floppy Panama hat, like Frank Lloyd Wright A.D. 1920 or somebody. The joke is -- if I have to explain it to you -- here is this snowman in the middle of January wearing a tropical hat."

Nine months later, Wolfe toyed with point-of-view again, shifting it right in mid-sentence in a wry report on the Army's mess hall switch from compartmentalized trays to separate dishes: "No sticklers for theory, Army ladle commanders have held to an action program for keeping the line moving. And if a hurried throw here and there imbedded the grapefruit slices and the chipped beef in the oatmeal -- well, where did you think you were? Vassar?"

* * *

It wasn't just the Tom Wolfe style that was born in the Post's pages; they served as the incubator, too, for many of his recurrent themes. And no theme would dominate his famous works like that of status -- the view that observable details about an individual's home, clothing and conduct will invariably reveal where he thinks he belongs in the Great Human Pecking Order.

So, reporting on the demise of lettered telephone exchanges, he exposed the capital's geographic divides: