I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
3 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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I Am Charlotte Simmons
A Novel

Author: Tom Wolfe

Narrator: Dylan Baker

Abridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/2004


Synopsis

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.

About Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

About Dylan Baker

Dylan Baker’s first audiobook recording was for The Grapes of Wrath, which subsequently won both Audie and Earphones Awards.  He has since narrated several audio books, including Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys. In 2002, he won an Audie Award for Abridged Fiction for Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. He has appeared in numerous films including Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Kinsey, Head of State, Thirteen Days, and Happiness.  Baker was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway performance in La Bete, and he won an Obie Award for his performance in the 1986 play Not About Heroes.  His television credits include guest appearances on The Practice, Law & Order, and The West Wing.  Baker earned his B.F.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale's School of Drama. 


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Jennifer on 2007-07-17 18:40:36

This is one of the most attention-grabbing and interest-holding books I've listened to in a while. Tom Wolfe is now one of my favorites.

AudiobooksNow review by Crystal on 2008-12-13 03:05:03

This is an excellent book that was recommended to me by a friend. This could definitely be easily made into a movie and reads like the perfect movie. College life explained by Tom Wolfe is top notch reading! Definitely recommend to others! I read this in less than a week!

Goodreads review by Holly on May 28, 2007

I came to I Am Charlotte Simmons with trepidation. I had read the reviews that likened Wolfe to a voyeur and questioned his motivation in spending years "observing" typical college students fifty years his junior. It seemed creepy. But when I saw it in the bargain bin, I couldn't resist, and as it t......more

Goodreads review by Ron on December 14, 2013

Halfway through Tom Wolfe's enormous new novel about contemporary college life, I finally devised a question to keep my interest piqued: "Is it humanly possible," I wondered, "to write another 100 pages - another 200 pages, another 300 pages - without describing a single surprising event?" It is. With......more

Goodreads review by Jonathan on January 07, 2016

This was far too long. When I am 200 pages into a book, I do not want a 50 page background on a character that probably wont matter anyway. Read The Rules of Attraction or The Sorrows of Young Mike if you want to know about college kids. Tom Wolfe is for people who have a lot of time on their hands.......more

Goodreads review by Elaine on May 13, 2007

Wolfe could not seem to decide whether he wanted Charlotte Simmons to be a satire or a legitimate zeitgeist piece. Thus, the characters come off as caricatures to ill effect. Wolfe should take a page from Sinclair Lewis, who somehow managed to write biting satire with still-believable protagonists a......more

Goodreads review by Brett on May 31, 2007

Any girl who has ever gone through the journey of the small liberal arts big name college will know parts of Charlotte in ways that take them back to times and insecurities that are far better left forgotten. Charlotte, the brain trust of her small town, enters the world of the privledged "it's mine......more


Quotes

“Our pre-eminent social realist...trains his all-seeing eye on the institution of the American university. . . . Wolfe's rhapsodic prose style finds its perfect target in academia's beer-soaked bacchanals.” —Henry Alford, Newsday

“Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. . . . A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.” —Lev Grossman, Time

“Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his...attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of slang dialogue, and that biting satire.” —Steve Garbarino, New York Post

“Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“[A] hilarious, exclamation-point filled novel.” —John Freeman, Time Out New York

“Brilliant . . . I couldn't stop reading it. . . . Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“A lot of fun . . . Hilarious.” —Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Tom Wolfe remains a peerless satirist. Alone among our fiction writers he is actively writing the human comedy, American-style, on a grand Dickensian scale.” —David Lehman, Bloomberg News

“Scathingly clear-eyed, often very funny take on college life.” —Robert Siegel, NPR, All Things Considered

“Dazzingly vivid . . . Tom Wolfe has served up another of his broadly entertaining novels.” —Adam Begley, The New York Observer

“His most fully realized and hands-down funniest work of fiction.” —Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

“Captivating . . . Sit back and enjoy the ride.” —Tom Walker, The Denver Post

“Tom Wolfe is America's greatest living novelist.” —Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard

“Rollicking . . . Just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms or The Great Gatsby, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years. . . . Professors like to complain that they get a year older every fall, while students always remain the same. Add I Am Charlotte Simmons to that magic circle of campus phenomena unlikely to age.” —Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Wolfe leaves no head unbashed . . . His eye and ear for detailed observation are incomparable; and observation is to the satirist what bullets are to a gun.” —The Boston Sunday Globe on Bonfire of the Vanities

“Human comedy, on a skyscraper scale and at a taxi-meter pace.” —Newsweek on Bonfire of the Vanities

“Richly entertaining . . . A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right.” —Washington Post Book World on Bonfire of the Vanities

“This novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist.... The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.” —The New York Times Book Review on A Man in Full

“Wolfe is a genius in full.” —People on A Man in Full

“Superior...utterly engrossing.” —USA Today on A Man in Full


Awards

  • Audie Award Finalist