“Who needs the Pulitzers? Next year it’s the Tom Wolfes.”

That was one guest’s parting words to another, after Tuesday night’s dinner for the inaugural Tom Wolfe Prizes for Fiction & Reportage at the Waverly Inn. Notables from literature, journalism, entertainment and the arts joined in the festivities surrounded by Ed Sorel’s murals from another era. Seth Meyers served as the evening’s emcee for the crowd that included Emma Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Waris Ahluwalia, Bette Midler, Amor Towles, Jay McInerney, Kurt Andersen, Lili Anolik, Lisa Taddeo, Walter Isaacson, Bruce Wagner, Scott Burns and Karah Preiss.

Before attendees tucked into some of The Waverly’s more savory specialties, Air Mail editor Graydon Carter welcomed guests to the event and recalled meeting Wolfe years before, when he first came to New York and described him as the “most inventive writer since P.G. Wodehouse.” Air Mail and Montblanc created the prize in honor of the author who died in 2018, who championed New Journalism and favored the Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pen. Wolfe’s wife Sheila Wolfe and their daughter Alexandra, who served on the nominating committee, were on hand.

After dinner, Parker said, “It was definitely a very tantalizing invite, because we didn’t actually understand what it was.”

Towles offered, “That was the best part about it.”

Parker said, “It was very easy to say, ‘Yes.’ Everybody I’ve spoken to just said, ‘Yes.’ Writers, Graydon, The Waverly and Tom Wolfe — that’s why I’m here.”

Towles added, nodding approvingly, “It turns out that’s all we needed to know.”

As “a huge fan” of Carter’s and Tom Wolfe’s, Meyers, who said he has always identified as a writer, told attendees, “This was the easiest thing in the world to say yes to.” Growing up in suburban New Hampshire, Meyers said he loved looking at party photos of “nights like this” in his mother’s copies of Vanity Fair, because it wasn’t just celebrities. It was also writers. I loved seeing pictures of writers talking to writers at parties. As a young person, I just assumed they were talking about writers. Obviously, I’m older now and I realize that they were talking about sex or alcohol. But at the time, it was very special to me…because of that I will never take for granted how special it is to be in a room like this one.”

Meyers added, “It’s very special to be with creative people at times like this. I don’t have to tell you that creativity is under attack be it from a government who doesn’t respect free speech. Be it from AI technology. It is deeply meaningful to be at a night that is optimistic and hopeful about what writing brings to the world.”

“Perfection” author Vincenzo Latronico picked up the Tom Wolfe Prize for Fiction and “The Catastrophe Hour” author Meghan Daum took home the Reportage prize. Their Basil Walter-designed trophies were shaped like Wolfe’s white homburg hat, as was the Lauren Schofield cake. Each winner received a $10,000 honorarium and a Montblanc Meisterstück pen. Alexandra Wolfe said, “My father would have been thrilled especially, because tonight brings together some of his very favorite things — fiction, nonfiction, Graydon Carter and fountain pens.”

She said, “He did so much with a fountain pen — much to my mother’s chagrin,” always writing his books with a Montblanc pen. “My mother got to type them up and these were long books. So, Mom was typing at the computer for many, many years.”

Recalling how her father always used to say, “Wherever you go to, take notes,” Wolfe praised Latronico for seemingly doing that with his book. Accepting the Fiction award, the Italian writer also thanked the translator Sophie Hughes, “who actually wrote the words you loved.” He said “’Perfection,’ as you know, is a work of fiction. But as you said, the work is entirely made of facts. Every detail is pilfered from the lives of people around me, or from my own. In a way, this is something that is increasingly happening in literature — the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is increasingly being tested. Maybe it’s because serial television has proven to be so good at telling different stories about real, bourgeoise everyday life that novels have to go somewhere else. But this is not an inhibition — it’s a freedom.”

Baum described getting into publishing in the early 1990s, coming to New York and reading Vanity Fair and the New Journalists, and how Wolfe embodied all of that. “I remember as a teenager going to the public library and checking out back issues of New York, Esquire and Rolling Stone and it was like, ‘Oh, this is not only how I want to write, but it’s how I want to be in the world.’ It was the best way of being in the world to be observing things in this way and then going and writing about them.”

While Tom Wolfe is synonymous with New Journalism, Baum praised his editor. “While working on the piece ‘That Kandy-Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (ARGHHHH!) Around the Bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM…)’ piece for Esquire in 1963, he couldn’t figure it out and was totally blocked. He finally typed up this long memo to explain what he had seen covering hot rod car culture in southern California.”

Baum said that Wolfe’s editor at Esquire Byron Dobell “did this brilliant thing. He took off the ‘Dear Byron’ at the top and just published the piece….One of the things about being in this business for 30 years is that I have been the beneficiary of great editing. I am so lucky to have been around at the time, when you were edited vigorously. Some of the editors drove you crazy and left you pulling your hair out. But we need editors to save us from ourselves and to make us better than we think that we can be.”

Baum added, “A lot of emerging young writers right now don’t have the luxury of that kind of editing.”  

Afterward, Wolfe’s wife said he would have liked the occasion, because the evening was “unpretentious, warm, cozy and lovely.” Having polished off her own 400-page memoir, she expects it to be released next year.