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I am Charlotte Simmons

tom wolfe

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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. 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 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 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 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.

null pages, Audio CD

First published December 9,2004
Literary awards
bad sex in fiction award, 

This edition

Format
null pages, Audio CD
Published
November 1, 2004 by Test Ods
ISBN
9781593977542
ASIN
1593977549
Language
English

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About the author

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tom wolfe

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Wolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies.

Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.


He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tom Wolfe is also famous for coining and defining the term fiction-absolute.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/tomwolfe

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
27(27%)
4 stars
35(35%)
3 stars
38(38%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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mooohn
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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I read this because I was curious given the rumors that it was in significant part a reflection of the Duke student experience. The only good thing I can say is that it was a page turner, much like a trashy soap, but I cringed throughout the book. Wolfe’s portrayal of the Black student athletes was racist and his attempts to portray their dialogue was both embarrassing and offensive. He generally described the Black students as one dimensional. Either they were the stereotype of an entitled jock or someone to fear you might offend. Of course he chose to center and feature the experiences of White students. There was one Asian character who was interesting and not based upon a stereotype but we hardly got to learn anything about her. I recognize that this was written in 2004 but ugh.
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taylorrtantrum
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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Brings back lots of college memories. This could almost be a required reading for any teenager planning to join the madness, in a good sense, that is college in the United States.
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XiRoLiRo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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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.
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orotaku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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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 because I'm entitled to it" college student. It should be a coming of age tale, and it is but in the twisted way. Charlotte loses herself and every belief she held to fit in from the first day of her freshman year to the last day of her senior. Her uncooth parents embarass her, and so she pushes them away. She is so insecure that she constantly obsesses about what she wears, what she eats, who she is seen with, how she speaks, and with whom she sleeps. After a few months, it's clear that she has lost her identity entirely. My favorite part about this book is what makes it real - disturbing but true - she doesn't come back around. And I think that's a reality. When we lose ourselves, we don't get that self back, we just create a new one. Maybe that new one mimics many parts of the old self, but the new insecurities prevent it from every returning to the original. If you want a pick me up, this is not the book. However, if you have been in this world and want to appreciate how you made it through and appreciate life on the other side, you won't be disappointed.
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pbndjay
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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No one does cliche and predictable like Tom Wolfe and makes it work. I have never read an author more sure of himself and his mission.
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Magicorn12
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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I got so much enjoyment out of this book. If you attempt to read it as an actual piece of literature (or, God forbid, actually purchase it) you will be incredibly insulted and possibly enraged. I wouldn't even deign to call these characters stereotypes because I think that would be giving them more credit than they rightly deserve. And if you read it as the desperate attempt of an aging writer to remain relevant, it might just make you sad (unless you are already enraged/insulted in which case feelings of hatred may render you unable to feel pity). This is the literary equivalent of Crossroads with Britney Spears. Instead, read it to revel in the hilariously awful (oh sorry, Mr. Wolfe, I meant "well-researched") writing. Especially enjoy the abundant use of the phrase "mons pubis." Seriously.

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IvanTheChemist
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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I was engrossed in this book from its first pages. I read it during the last semester of my 6-year-long midlife return to college, and felt it was right on the money in its depiction of certain segments of college life. My university is a well-known Southern party school, close rival of another well-known Southern party school where Wolfe did a good bit of research--and where similar events are not uncommon. Like I said, right on. Exaggerated of course, and skewered with rapier wit as only Wolfe can. Beautiful, eloquent language. Wolfe has the right stuff, for sure.

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JeremiahOrange
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 31,2025
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Tom Wolfe undoubtedly did some research and got some things right. His humorously pedantic grammar lesson in adolescent "fuck patois" is impossible not to laugh at, his descriptions of fraternity parties are disgustingly accurate, his portrayal of the athletic monomania of D1 schools utterly on point. He even, once or twice, manages to grasp the mental gymnastics young women are forced to perform when trying to figure out what men want from them, and how they're going to escape unscathed if it tuns out to be something they don't want. Unfortunately, that's the extent of Wolfe's insight. His titular protagonist--the only significant female character in the entire book--is a textbook example of the way men think women think. She's pretty but charmingly unaware of how pretty she is, wants men to want her but not to give them what they want, and is obliged to drop everything and take care of said men when they need her, whether as a girlfriend, mother, tutor, witness, whatever. She's the worst sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a kind of humorless redneck Rory Gilmore, so smart and so pretty and so crucially not like other girls. She's also so naive it borders on imbecilic, and characterized as "virginal"--implicitly and explicitly--with fetishistic perseverance. Despite the fact that she's about as interesting to read as the Yellow Pages, every guy in the book is dying to deflower her, in grossly graphic detail. (In a scene which takes place at the university gym, one of these would-be Lotharios waxes poetic about the line of sweat in her ass crack. I wish I were making that up.) When her virtue is finally besmirched, it sends her into the sort of downward spiral nuns warned me about in Catholic school: she gets drunk and lets a boy take her clothes off and all of a sudden she's sullied, dirty, worthless, unable to even drag herself out of bed until--Surprise!--a man comes to the rescue. (The same man, incidentally, who was so enthralled by the sweating of her posterior. What a prince.) After a truly unbelievable deus ex machina, the book ends on a peculiar note, with Charlotte emerging from her tribulations having completed her devolution from "not like other girls" to exactly like other girls: in other words, a catty vapid bitch. In Wolfe's collegiate world, there are no other options.
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