I Am Charlotte Simmons

by Tom Wolfe

In Tom Wolfe's morality tale, his innocent heroine, Charlotte Simmons, is an earnest freshman at the fictional Dupont University. Charlotte is shocked by the campus goings-on--sex, drugs, rock & roll, and worse--and by the amoral, high-living students she encounters: her roommate is a snooty rich girl with no morals, and (in a graphically described scene) Charlotte loses her virginity to a caddish heartbreaker. A sexual scandal and a sports scandal concentrate the plot, as Charlotte endures a series of trials, at the end of which she emerges older, wiser, and in control. Wolfe's novel takes place entirely on the college campus, and most of the characters are students in a work that is quite different from his last novels--and one that is, inevitably, seen as a tour de force by a 74-year-old writer whose college days are far behind him and who has created, for the first time, a female heroine. A New York Times Notable Book for 2004.

Editions of I Am Charlotte Simmons

ISBN 9780786272914	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Thorndike Pr	Date 2005	Price $1.00	Good
ISBN 9781593975791	Binding/Format Digital	Publisher Audio Renaissance	Date	Price None Available
ISBN 9781593975784	Binding/Format Digital	Publisher Audio Renaissance	Date	Price None Available
ISBN 9780312424442	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Picador USA	Date 2005	Price $1.00	Used, Very Good
ISBN 9780792733539	Binding/Format Compact Disc	Publisher Chivers Audio Books	Date 2004	Price $14.95	Good
ISBN 9780792733546	Binding/Format MP3 CD	Publisher Chivers Audio Books	Date 2004	Price $1.00	Used - Like New
ISBN 9780374281588	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux	Date 2004	Price $1.00	Used, Good
ISBN 9781593975180	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher St Martins Pr	Date 2004	Price $1.44	Used - Good
ISBN 9781593975203	Binding/Format Compact Disc	Publisher Macmillan Audio	Date 2004	Price $9.27	New

Media Reviews

"Wolfe's books are usually more about setting than character, but Charlotte's delicately drawn highs and lows give the book an unexpectedly tender heart....[A] rich, wise, absorbing and irresistible novel. Wolfe does things with words--exhilarating, intoxicating, impossible things--that no other writer can do....I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS will get attention for the smutty scenes, of which there are a generous but judicious number...But Wolfe's interest is not prurient. His real subject is the nature of identity, of the individual soul (Charlotte's in particular), and whether or not it can survive uncorrupted in the acid storm of sex and alcohol and power and peer pressure into which we ritually plunge our young in the name of higher education. The answer he arrives at is not simple. Some get their comeuppance in Charlotte Simmons, and some are redeemed, but Charlotte's fate is a surprise, and not everybody will find it a pleasant one. Wolfe may be getting old, but he's not getting soft."

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