There was mortification in the Gotham magazine world when in 1965, Wolfe produced a send-up of the venerable New Yorker editor, William Shawn, in an article for the New York magazine called "Little Mummies". It was a writing streak that took him right through to his 1979 treatment of John Glenn - back in space as you read this - and his colleagues on the Mercury space programme in The Right Stuff and, eventually, to his career as a novelist.Enemies were also made along the way because of the people Wolfe skewered. And Wolfe stuck with the style through his subsequent non-fiction books. From the hot-rod assignment sprang his first book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a collection of essays, followed by The Pump House Gang and, in 1968, his still-famous depiction of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

It was a kind of loose, lunatic form of reportage that borrowed heavily from the world of fiction, and indeed occasionally erred right into it. But so struck was Dobell by the free-form power of the memo he received from Wolfe next day, he lopped off the "Dear Byron" and ran them almost verbatim.So began the school of New Journalism of which Wolfe became the leading champion, even though he has since insisted that others, such as Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, had got there before him. His legend as a reporter, however, begins with a freelance assignment for Esquire magazine and the editor Byron Dobell. Dobell had sent him, at great expense, to southern California to write about young kids and their passion for customised hot-rod cars.

Wolfe, however, suffered a block and could not deliver the piece on deadline. Dobell told him to file his notes anyway, so that a formal article could be fashioned at head office. In other words, more novelists should write as he did in Vanities. While this burst of self-satisfaction was hardly attractive, there is one thing you cannot take away from Wolfe - reporting is what he has always done.Wolfe began his journalistic career at the Springfield Union newspaper in Massachusetts in 1962. Soon, he found himself at the since-closed New York Herald Tribune, where he recalled having a "feeling of amazed Bohemian bliss". By all accounts, they are also the writers he prefers to read.The Harpers piece, entitled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast", carried the subtitle: "A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel." In it, he asserted that if the American novel was to survive, it would have to return to "a highly detailed realism based on reporting". He accuses them, in other words, of jettisoning their notebooks.