But such early deaths were a weekly occurrence in this profession, and Wolfe uses this fact not only to help flesh out his depiction of how such men think, but to highlight the extraordinary danger the seven astronauts-Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, and Grissom-walked into not only knowingly, but gleefully. Hell, at 97 years old, Chuck Yeager isn’t just still alive, he’s on Twitter.

The Right Stuff is also a uniquely death-haunted book, which is sort of curious when you consider that, apart from Gus Grissom, one of the Mercury Seven, who died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a Command Module fire in 1967 during a test before the Apollo 1 launch, none of Wolfe’s major protagonists suffered the kind of tragic early death so common among test pilots at the time, and which Wolfe chronicles in almost excruciating detail early on. among the true brothers of the right stuff.” A war hero and test pilot who was the first man to break the sound barrier but who never went to space-who was not even considered to be part of the Mercury program-Yeager is the standard against which all pilots and astronauts must be measured. It’s a mini-biography of the seven astronauts chosen for NASA’s Mercury program, as well as a mini-biography of Chuck Yeager, “the ace of all aces. The book functions not merely as a history of the space race during the Cold War from the mid-’50s and into the early ’60s it is also a psychological profile of astronauts and test pilots, a simultaneous satire and celebration of American ingenuity (and, not to be too precious about it, a psychological profile of same). Literary, wildly stylish-at times to a fault-and huge in scope, The Right Stuff would remain arguably Wolfe’s most ambitious work until he began writing the long novels that would dominate the second half of his career. It was distinct from Wolfe’s other books up to that point, which were mostly collections of his essays (the only exception being 1975’s The Painted Word, which in more ways than one is more booklet than book) by being a long work of narrative nonfiction. In 1979, Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff, his landmark book about the beginnings of the American space program. ( Bulwark+ members can listen to an exclusive discussion of this piece and the various iterations of The Right Stuff here.

Chuck yeager the right stuff book