Writer Tom Wolfe, shown June 25, 2008, will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation. (Peter Kramer/Associated Press)

Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, has won the 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

The foundation, which annually hands out the prestigious National Book Awards, announced the lifetime achievement honour on Wednesday.

Wolfe is considered a pioneer of New Journalism, the writing style begun in the late 1960s that applied literary techniques to non-fiction writing.

His fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities delineated the greed and venality of 1980s New York and his non-fiction work The Right Stuff described America's first astronauts.

The foundation plans to give a special prize for outstanding service to the American literary community to Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the founders of Children's Television Workshop, which created Sesame Street.

Cooney had been a researcher into television and education and wrote a paper titled The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education before she was able to get the support to create Sesame Street. She became producer of the program.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York studies the role of digital technologies in childhood literacy.

Nominees for the National Book Awards will be announced Oct. 13. All the winners will be honoured at a gala Nov. 17.