The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style.

"No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review)

"A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy." (The New Republic)

Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now.

Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America.

Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was a founding member of the New Journalism movement and the author of modern classics including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He wrote for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine as a reporter, and is credited with coining the term The Me Decade. Tom received the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Achievement, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Outstanding Contribution to American Literature, among many other awards. He received his B.A. from the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. graduating with honors and a Ph.D. from Washington and Lee University.

at Yale University, where he majored in American studies. He was a New York City resident.