Right Stuff, The

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Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. The Right Stuff, he explains, became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero. Wolfe"s roots in New Journalism were intertwined with the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote had pioneered with In Cold Blood. As Capote did, Wolfe tells his story from a limited omniscient perspective, dropping into the lives of his characters as each in turn becomes a major player in the space program. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot"s wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne. Wolfe traces Alan Shepard"s suborbital flight and Gus Grissom"s embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch ...

The inner world of the early astronauts, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and their confreres, that the author describes with his extraordinary powers of empathy. He shows us the hidden Olympus to which all ambitious combat and test pilots aspired, the top of the pyramid of 'the right stuff.' And we learn the nature of the ineffable pilot's grace without which all else meant nothing. Basis for the very successful big screen film.

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