Graydon Carter’s weekly magazine Air Mail is rolling out the inaugural Tom Wolfe Prize for Fiction and Reportage with help from Montblanc.
Wolfe, an inventive novelist and the father of New Journalism, is still widely read seven years after his death at the age of 88. The Virginian started his career as a newspaper reporter with stops at the Springfield Union, The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune. But it was an Esquire article about Southern California’s hot rod and custom car culture that led to his first book “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” Millions more know Wolfe as the author of “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff.”
Aligned with his fiction and nonfiction agility, the new annual award will salute outstanding emerging talent in both fiction and nonfiction writing. Each winner will receive a $10,000 honorarium. The prize’s presenter Montblanc is apt, given the luxury company’s handle on the writing culture and the fact that Wolfe wrote much of his work with Montblanc’s Meisterstück pen.
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Carter and Air Mail crafted the idea for the prize, which will be awarded to one fiction writer and one nonfiction scribe whose work embodies Wolfe’s imaginative, precise and literary elan. When asked about the prospect, Wolfe’s daughter Alexandra Schiff Wolfe said, “My father was always a friend of Graydon Carter’s, and such a fan of his style of writing, and view of the world.”
Wolfe’s affinity for Montblanc fountain pens can still be seen on the huge ink-stained table that the writer designed to anchor the study in the New York City apartment where his wife still lives. “It’s pretty much unchanged. If you go to his house, it looks like he went out for a walk. There are still all of his fountain pens, and his ballpoint pens too,” Schiff said. “He even had a black and white pinstriped pen that Montblanc designed at some point.”
She continued, “Every year my poor mother would try to get him to buy a computer for Christmas to get him off the typewriter. The [typewriter] ribbons were hard to find after a while. So you would have to buy them on eBay. He would start writing his novels with pens, and then my mother would have to transcribe them. He wrote many of his novels by hand in the last 10 or 15 years of his life.”
Wolfe routinely spent hours handwriting Christmas cards with Montblanc fountain pens until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, his daughter said. “He would be stumbling down the stairs in the morning because he was so exhausted. But everything had been handwritten or drawn.”
Letter-writing was Wolfe’s preferred means of procrastination, whenever he got stuck writing a book. “He didn’t have hobbies,” Schiff said. “He would swing a bat in the backyard, because he played baseball. But aside from that, and watching baseball on TV for maybe 10 minutes, he would write and draw. Every letter that he wrote to me in college is pages and pages of calligraphic notes.”
Even Wolfe’s typewritten pages included handwritten footnotes that were inserted, on the reverse of some pages or on another page altogether. When he was finishing a book, the dining room table would just be scattered with pages and pages of handwritten notes with numbers and cross references. There was a method to his madness. I think he understood where everything went a lot better on paper than in some random file on the computer,” Schiff said.
As for how the author’s unofficial uniform of all-white suits held up with all of those Montblanc pens, Schiff said, “I think he had a very good dry cleaner. At his memorial, Christopher Buckley opened the service with this great line, ‘No one is sadder today than Tom Wolfe’s dry cleaner.’ He had 24 custom white suits. When one was getting deep cleaned, he would use another one,” Schiff said.
Along with a Cadillac radio, the custom desk that Wolfe designed included an ink-blotting skin, but there were still “a lot of trips to the dry cleaner.”
Wolfe’s meticulous all-white attire inspired a Tom Wolfe character on “The Simpsons.” In real life, the author enlisted a cousin to design some custom looks including a mohair white jacket. “On the weekends, that’s what he would do — he would draw, he would write and he would go to the tailor.”
Carter and Schiff are part of the nominating committee that includes the filmmaker Wes Anderson, the writer and director Lena Dunham, Belletrist founders Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss, New York Times opinion columnist and author John McWhorter, “Three Women” author Lisa Taddeo, and Montblanc’s director of writing culture and brand strategy Alexa Schilz. The winners will be revealed early this fall, and they will be honored at The Waverly Inn in New York City. Carter said in a statement, “We wanted to create an award that feels both serious and celebratory — one that reflects the elegance and sharpness of Wolfe’s writing, and encourages new work in that spirit.”
Air Mail is also putting out the welcome mat for public participation, with nominations being submitted via litprize@airmail.news.
