Description: "Tom Wolfe's panoramic novel of the go-go New York City of the 1980s, discussing power and the racial and ethnic tensions simmering below the city's gleaming veneer"--
Brief description: Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, "The Me Decade." Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.
Review Quotes:
"A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let you go." --The New York Times Book Review
"The Bonfire of the Vanities chronicles the collapse of a Wall Street bond trader, and examines a world in which fortunes are made and lost at the blink of a computer screen. . . . Wolfe's subject couldn't be more topical: New Yorkers' relentless pursuit and flaunting of wealth, and the fury it evokes in the have-nots." --USA Today "A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right." --The Washington Post Book World "A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy." --The New Republic "More than a tour de force." --Time