The Purple Decades: A Reader

The essential collection of Tom Wolfe’s writing on a turning-point era in modern American culture.

The Purple Decades brings together the author's selections from his list of critically acclaimed publications, including the complete text of Mau-Mauing and the Flak Catchers, his account of the wild games the poverty program encouraged minority groups to play.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s—those “purple decades”—that Tom Wolfe rose to fame as one of the late-twentieth-century pioneers of Ameri...