The Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University hosts prominent American non-fiction writer and novelist Tom Wolfe on Friday, October 15, at the annual faculty retreat. During the lecture, Wolfe will discuss his latest book The Human Beast, which explores the nature of human beings. The lecture will be held from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in Wilder Pavilion and is open to the Bentley community only.

"We are privileged to host author Tom Wolfe, one of America's most important and influential living authors, whose work as one of the founders of New Journalism has heavily influenced American letters," says Bentley Dean of Arts and Sciences Daniel Everett.

About Tom Wolfe: Award-winning American non-fiction writer and author Tom Wolfe began his career in newspaper journalism at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, later writing for the Washington Post, the New York Herald-Tribune, and New York magazine. As the Washington Post's Latin American correspondent, he won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba. In 1965 he completed his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of articles about the flamboyant sixties written for New York magazine and Esquire. The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism. He has since written a total of 15 books. In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970, he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The Right Stuff, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post World War II era and the early space program, became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, is a story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, and was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s. "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." Additional bestselling novels include A Man in Full and I am Charlotte Simmons.