Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances and social styles in our status-minded world.

In Radical Chic, Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene—and its astonishing repercussions—with high fidelity.

In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco’s militant minorities in response to a highly bureaucratized poverty program.