The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff is Tom Wolfe's account of the test pilots and the first astronauts, and of the unnamable quality the title gestures at, the blend of skill, nerve, and willingness to sit on top of a rocket that separated the men at the top of the pyramid from everyone else. The book opens not at Cape Canaveral but at Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs and never became famous, and where pilots augured in weekly while their wives decoded the ranks of widowhood; Wolfe's restoration of Yeager, the greatest pilot nobody had heard of, is the book's engine and its verdict on celebrity. Then comes Sputnik panic and Project Mercury, and Wolfe follows the seven chosen astronauts, Glenn, Shepard, Grissom, and the rest, as the press canonizes them before they have flown anything, the doctors poke them, the engineers debate whether the capsule even needs a window, and the pilots fight to remain pilots rather than, in the book's merciless phrase, spam in a can. Wolfe spent years on the reporting and writes it in the full New Journalism style he had invented, status detail, interior voice, exclamation marks and all, and the result is that rare thing, a book about heroism that is simultaneously a comedy about publicity. It won the 1980 American Book Award for General Nonfiction in hardcover, the National Book Award under the name it briefly carried, and became his biggest bestseller to that point, and the 1983 film carried the phrase into the language for good. Few books about American spaceflight have been written better.