Novelist Tom Wolfe has spent more than three decades chronicling American culture and its foibles with uncanny accuracy and wit. His latest novel, “A Man in Full,” explores the New South and American race relations today, just as his celebrated novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” first serialized in Rolling Stone, captured the class structure and politics of New York in the 1980s.

Wolfe will bring his observations on America to Penn April 18, as the keynote speaker for the School of Arts and Sciences’ Dean’s Forum, which recognizes outstanding academic achievement by students in the College.

—S.S.

TOM WOLFE: Wednesday, April 18, at 4:30 p.m. in Harrison Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania Museum, 33rd and Spruce streets.