THE
OTUNDA Tuesday. April 23, 1985
Sixty-fourth year
Wolfe Accepts Dos Passos Prize Tom Wolfe accepted Longwood College's John Dos Passos Prize for Literature recently after delighting an audience with a reading from his new novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe, a Virginia-born writer who has chronicled American popular culture since the mid1960s, accepted the award in a ceremony April 17 in Wygal Auditorium. The award, which has been given annually since j 1980, includes a $1,000 cash prize and a medal. A 54-year-old native of Richmond, Wolfe has been a leader of the so-called New Journalism, which blends the creativity of fiction-writing with standard reporting. Among his best-known works are Electric KoolAid Acid Test and The Right Stuff. William F. Buckley once wrote that Wolfe is "probably the most skillful writer in America." Wolfe —who wore his trademark white doublebreasted jacket, white slacks and white shoes—read from the first installment of The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is being published serially in Rolling Stone. The novel, Wolfe's first, is about life in New York City, with the major characters coming from diverse backgrounds. Some 21 chapters have been published so far. The segment that Wolfe read contains a humorous vignette about a successful writer who takes his dog for a walk one evening so he can phone his mistress. Accidentally, he calls home and his wife recognizes his voice, prompting suspicion. There is also a struggling prosecutor in the Bronx who, to fend off would-be muggers on the subway, dresses like a seedy "D-train lunatic" on the way to work. Serial novels, or those published in regular installments, were popular in mid and late 19th-century England, beginning with The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. "Dickens became an overnight success because of The Pickwick Papers. Before that, he had been an obscure journalist," said Dr. Michael Lund, associate professor of English at
Longwood College Farmville, Virginia
Longwood. Almost all future novels by Dickens were published serially, either by themselves or in magazines. Dr. Lund, an authority on serial novels, hopes that The Bonfire of the Vanities will lead to a resurgence of this literary genre. After writing a letter to
cyclopedia. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and has a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. One Longwood student, Donna Breckenridge of Farmville, plans to write a master's thesis in English, pending approval, that analyzes Wolfe's
Number 23
Dorm Fire Brings Safety Questions By Mark Holland "You only lose when you play with fire; it's not a game." It is ironic that this bulletin board message should be displayed inside the Cunningham complex. On the first floor of Main Cunningham, one of the extinguisher is empty, the other, last checked on the 19th of November, needs a safety pin along with its overdue recharge. On the second floor of South Cunningham, there is only one fire extinguisher. In the entire Cunningham complex there are only four fire extinguishers at the acceptable 100% level. The problem was evident on Friday night. This situation was never more evident than on Friday night when a room on the first floor of South Cunningham caught on fire. According to
Doug Samuels, the R.E.C. on duty that weekend, the 10:30 blaze was apparently touched off by a stray cigarette butt that fell onto the window ledge and caught the shade on fire. The flame then spread into the room and caught an 8' x 4' wallhanging on fire. By the time the first students entered the room it was filled with smoke and the flames were licking up the walls. The first fire extinguisher could barely manage a stream. It did more to soak the bed than dampen the flames. Another extinguisher produced a stream more like that of a garden hose. When the wall-hanging fell behind the bed, the situation worsened. Only one extinguisher was in proper working order. Longwood officials are investigating the incident.
Schools Update Dorms
Author Tom Wolfe reading from Vanitie$.
Wolfe last summer, he received a reply in which Wolfe said, "Writing one of these things is like trying to clamber up the back of a truck that's already going 15 miles per hour. You don't know rf you're heading down the road or head-first into the dust. Wish me luck." A former newspaper and magazine reporter, Thomas Kennedy Wolfe Jr. is known for his "lively rhetoric and amusing observations of American social life... As a contributor to Esquire, he established a type of journalism that is characterized by the flagrant use of fictional devices to present intentionally colored facts," according to Academic American En-
his new work. The Bonfire of new novel, which Dr. Lund called "the only living serial novel." She attended the reading and spoke with Wolfe at a reception later in the Alumni House. "I asked him how it would end," said Mrs. Breckenridge, who has read the novel from the beginning. "He said, 'Look for a happy ending.' But he added, 'Remember that happy endings are sometimes sad'." The Bonfire of the Vanities is Wolfe's first major-length work since The Right Stuff, which, coincidentally, grew out of a series of articles in Rolling Stone in 1973. It is scheduled to end in mid-summer.
For college students, access to cable television, automated banking machines and an occasional lobster dinner or late night pizza used to mean having to go off campus. Not anymore. Thanks to administrators' worries about attracting students to their dorms and intensifying competition for rents with offcampus apartment complexes, an increasing number of schools are offering a smorgasboard of once-unheard-of amenities for next fall. At the University of North Dakota, some dorms have weight rooms and saunas. At Eastern Michigan University, some on-campus residents have access to computer rooms in their dormitories, and are offered 12-month leases. At the University of Oklahoma, free cable television in dormitory lounges, a pizza bar and an automated banking machine are in the works for next fall. The school also has hired a new food service director and given free reign to plan what administrations call "monotony breakers," such as lobster dinners "Try as we might, there re
some areas in which we just cannot compete with apartment complex owners," say OU assistant housing director Craig Pulliam. "But there is an awful lot we can do." Dormitory residents are not pampered at every school. Many institutions still face perennial dormitory over-crowding, particularly at the beginning of the school year. "It's sporadic across the country," says Jim Grimm, housing director at the University of Florida and president of a national housing officers group. Grimm estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of the nation's colleges now have a hard time filling their dorms. Some schools—Oklahoma and the Superior and Oshkosh campuses of the University of Wisconsin among them—are being forced to close dormitories. But the schools still have to pay of mortgages on closed dorms, so, to avoid similar fates, most vacant dorms are turning increasingly to more aggressive marketing And some schools that are still full are offering students more to stay on campus, if only to keep Continued on page 4