This week on Uncommon Knowledge, Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe holds a position in American letters unlike that of any other writer. Brilliant prose stylist; trenchant social critic; humorist; founder of an entire school of journalism, the New Journalism; coiner of phrases, such as “the me decade” and “radical chic,” that have achieved utterly universal currency; art and architecture critic; science writer; and household name. “Publishing Tom Wolfe,” says his editor at Little, Brown, “is like publishing Mark Twain.”

In today’s segment, I ask the author of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities what he happens to be working on now. The answer? A great big rollicking new novel, Back to the Blood, set in—ah, but why deprive you of the pleasure of hearing Tom Wolfe describe it himself?

If you’ve ever wondered what it must have been like to listen to Twain, click here and listen to Wolfe.