Renowned author Tom Wolfe dies at 87

Famed  American author Tom Wolfe — who chronicled American power and greed in “Bonfire of the Vanities” and its reach for the stars in “The Right Stuff” — died Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

Wolfe’s longtime agent Lynn Nesbit confirmed the writer’s death to ABC News. Nesbit said Wolfe died after being hospitalized with an infection.

Known as the father of “New Journalism,” a form of news writing that employed literary techniques, Wolfe dissected the underbelly of American life, exploring the intricacies of people who frolick in the perch of power to those who tripped on acid through the counter-culture revolution.

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence,” Wolf once said in an interview.

Known as a natty dresser in his signature white three-piece suits and spectator shoes, Wolfe exhibited a bon vivant man about town even though his roots traced to a Southern middle-class upbringing.

He once said his style of dress was an accident and accentuated his contrarian attitude. One summer Wolfe had a white suit made for summer but it was too warm, so he wore it in December and found that it “really irritated people – I had hit upon this harmless form of aggression.”