The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

work by Wolfe

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June 17, 2026

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The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is a 1964 collection of essays by Tom Wolfe. This work is a prime example of New Journalism, a style that blends journalistic research with fictional writing techniques. The essays satirize American trends and celebrities of the 1960s, with the title piece focusing on car customizers. This collection helped popularize New Journalism, a movement that aimed to bring literary flair and subjective experience to reporting on real events.1324

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Tom Wolfe
Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1964), is a collection of essays satirizing American trends and celebrities of the 1960s. That work—especially the title piece about car customizers, which was reported to have been a lengthy memo to his editor at Esquire—helped give rise to New…
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Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1964), is a collection of essays satirizing American trends and celebrities of the 1960s. That work—especially the title piece about car customizers, which was reported to have been a lengthy memo to his editor at Esquire—helped give rise to New…
Read More

New Journalism
From muckraking to Wolfe, Talese, and Capote
…result was Wolfe’s now-famous “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (anthologized in his 1964 book by the same name), an energetic piece that became a model of what New Journalism could achieve. In 1973 Wolfe published The New Journalism, in which he explicated the features of the genre. He went…
Read More
…result was Wolfe’s now-famous “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (anthologized in his 1964 book by the same name), an energetic piece that became a model of what New Journalism could achieve. In 1973 Wolfe published The New Journalism, in which he explicated the features of the genre. He went…
Read More