Like a prize-winning reporter, fame follows Tom Wolfe, even when he swaps the white suit for a blue blazer, even when he visits some strip club in Miami as research – yes, research – for his new novel.

“I was the only man with a necktie,” he says with a chuckle, back in his trademark white during a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment. “They seat you in these little couches, and it was like a furniture show room – all these pieces of furniture would stretch long for maybe 40 feet. So I’m sitting there and this guy, must have been a bouncer, came over and said, ‘Hey, you’re Tom Wolfe aren’t you?’ ”

Millions know the meaning of “Tom Wolfe”: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff,” the “Me” decade and “radical chic,” the punched-up prose and the blaze of white. At age 81, his hair is thinned and his posture stooped, but the face remains impish and his manner wide-eyed and boyish at all the amazing things that happen – the kinds of stories, he likes to say, that you can’t make up.