Due to a cabling error, the umbilicals separated in the wrong order, leading to an electrical fault that shut down the engine. That is the Mercury-Redstone 1 launch failure, also known as 'The four-inch flight'. Among his many awards was the National Book Foundation Medal for a Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and he continued to publish provocative non-fiction into his eighties, most recently 2016’s The Kingdom of Speech, a critique of Charles Darwin and the linguist Noam Chomsky.The failure montage ends with a rocket that goes nowhere and just lets out a humorous 'pop'. Wolfe’s radical experiments with the use of literary techniques alongside ‘straight’ reporting came to typify the ‘New Journalism’ movement – most famously in The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of the emerging hippie scene in the late 1960s. After several years reporting for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, his breakthrough came in the mid-1960s. Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia and studied at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, followed by a doctorate at Yale, before abandoning academia for a career in journalism. Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) is best known as a pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’ and as the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, the acclaimed and bestselling novel about 1980s Wall Street. Opening with a new introduction by space historian Andrew Chaikin and featuring Tavis Coburn’s striking retro-styled graphic illustrations, this is an exceptional edition of a 20th-century classic from the Folio Society. Dazzlingly written, this is a thrilling account of men who ‘pushed the edge of the envelope’ at work and play, all to prove they possessed the quality that Wolfe famously christened the right stuff. He blows apart the mythology of the Mercury Seven – Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper – and the forerunner of them all, supersonic test pilot Chuck Yeager. ‘What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ In The Right Stuff, hailed as one of the greatest books ever written about space flight, Tom Wolfe sets out to answer the question, and lays bare the mindset and motivations of the first American astronauts to risk life and limb to beat the Soviets into orbit.

Chuck yeager the right stuff book