American journalist and novelist Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. (born 1931), was a major figure in the "New Journalism" which began in the 1960s.

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 2, 1931, the son of Thomas Kennerly and Helen (Hughes) Wolfe. He graduated from Washington and Lee University (1951) and earned a doctorate in American studies at Yale University in 1957, with a dissertation on "The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity among American Writers, 1929-1942." Wolfe married Sheila Berger (art director of Harper's magazine) in 1978. They had two children: Alexandra and Thomas.

He began his career as a journalist, including positions at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union, The Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune, where he was a feature writer. In 1963 Wolfe won recognition for a series of articles in Esquire and New York, the Sunday magazine of the Herald Tribune. Some of Wolfe's articles were...