I Am Charlotte Simmons Book

2005 Audie Award Finalist

America’s “peerless observer” (People) uncovers college life—from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating—plus race, class, sex, and basketball

Dupont University—the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America’s youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition...Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters Dupont’s privileged elite—her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont’s godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university’s “independent” newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock- obsessed campus—she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.

With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ‘00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America’s master chronicler.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision -- I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it's still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author. Rhetoric -- the art of persuasion -- lies at the heart of all writing, but we dislike feeling too overtly manipulated, and works that blatantly force our emotions along precise paths we dub inartistic, mere propaganda or programmatic writing with a social or political agenda. I Am Charlotte Simmons is such a work. I couldn't stop reading it -- who could? This is Tom Wolfe, after all -- but that didn't prevent me from regarding the author's premise, characters and views as hardly more than an ill-tempered, Mrs. Grundy-like rant against reckless youth and this immoral modern age. Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure before his arias of coloratura description, he can do just about anything in these pages with words, including exaggerate, distort and rant.