The Right Stuff
Wolfe helped create New Journalism (the use of fictional techniques in nonfiction) and this account of the original Mercury astronauts is his masterwork. He captured both the courage and the absurdity of the space race with prose that moves like a rocket and never stops being fun to read.
The Grissom section draws real anger: Wolfe uses elevated heart-rate readings to imply he “hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job,” a claim with no hard evidence, and Grissom died in the Apollo 1 fire without ever answering it. The women at Pancho's and the astronaut wives get a leering, dated treatment, reduced to “moist labial piping little birds,” which readers find creepy from an author in his late forties. That trademark style and its “hipper-than-thou tone” exhaust well before the end, one reader describing “being shouted at for great lengths of time.” And Wolfe reconstructs private thoughts he could not have witnessed, “too weirdly subjective” to take as reporting.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
