PEN America Winter 2017 Author’s Evening with Tom Wolfe

We’re Sorry, this dinner has been SOLD OUT.

You are invited to a private dinner with author Tom Wolfe.

The dinner will be hosted by Diahn & Tom McGrath at their Upper East Side home on Thursday, February 16 at 7:30pm.

Wolfe will discuss his novel The Kingdom of Speech, in which he provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in The Kingdom of Speech.

Praise for The Kingdom of Speech: “The Kingdom of Speech is an Olympic dive into the Rio-murky waters of evolution and language. Is speech a product of evolution, Wolfe asks, or of the free play of the human mind? The author’s own prose is, as ever, a marvelous mix of gleeful energy and whip-around-the-neck control, and his book is a gas to read. It’s also kind of bonkers.” —The Wall Street Journal

Tom Wolfe is an American author and journalist, best known for his association with and influence over the New Journalism literary movement, in which literary techniques are used extensively and traditional values of journalistic objectivity and evenhandedness are rejected. He began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, but achieved national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters), and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim, became a commercial success, and was adapted as a major motion picture.

Seating at this dinner is limited and available by making a donation to PEN America.

Please contact Florencia Varela at [email protected] for more information.