The Right Stuff

1. The Right Stuff

2. The Right Stuff Characters Test Pilots (alive and dead) Astronauts The Wives Chuck Yeager The support personnel

3. Themes • lab rats • cold war • space race • masculine and feminine roles • What is a pilot? • What is a hero?

4. What is the Right Stuff? • skill • arrogance • macho • superstition • demeanor

5. Chapter Titles • Who are the angels? Other Stylistic Markers of Wolfe Stream of Consciousness Dialogue? Description Setting: Edwards Air Force Base, the various landscapes

6. Tom Wolfe PhD from Yale (American Studies) Journalist since the mid 1950's Rolling Stone Writer Bonfire of the Vanities He makes lots of people angry.

7. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers • Or—what does one wear to these parties for the Panthers or the Young Lords or the grape workers? What does a woman wear? Obviously one does not want to wear something frivolously and pompously expensive, such as a Gerard Pipart party dress. On the other hand one does not want to arrive “poor-mouthing it” in some outrageous turtleneck and West Eighth Street bell-jean combination, as if one is “funky” and of “the people.”

8. From tomwolfe.com • "The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero."