By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeager and his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literary merits are secure. The author also produces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism and selfless dedication. 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 too soon).
Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne. 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. 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. " 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. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe.
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. (For more movie musical magic, check out “ The Wiz.Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer perform admirably in the leads, but Rita Moreno and George Chakiris steal the show in support - and won Oscars for their efforts, two of the film’s astonishing ten-statue haul, which included prizes for best picture and best director. The original stage director and choreographer Jerome Robbins and the filmmaker Robert Wise shared directorial duties, thrillingly placing the show’s songs and dances on the real streets of New York City while using the proximity and intimacy of the camera to render the longing and loss of the story even more poignant. So it’s no surprise that it spawned one of the great movie musicals. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’s ingenious musical adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet,” which updated its setting and story to the streets and gangs of New York, remains one of the towering achievements of the Broadway stage.
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