Book description
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 Sparta, North Carolina,
who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns
that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump
academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters Dupont's elite - her roommate, Beverly, a
fleshy, privileged Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo
Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike
basketball team; the Young Turk 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 Gellin, one of the Millennium Mutants who run the
university's 'independent' newspaper and who consider themselves the
last bastion of intellectual endeavour on 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.
Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them
The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the
Vanities
and
A Man in Full
. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B. A. at Washington and
Lee University and a Ph. D. in American studies at Yale. He lives in New
York City.
