Bonfire Of The Vanities

Vintage Tom Wolfe, 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)

Tom Wolfe is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He lives in New York City. Tom Wolfe's first novel remains a definitive work of American fiction after more than twenty years in print. It looks at the greed and racism on New York City's underbelly in the 1980s through the eyes of four fictional individuals, composites of characteristics that Wolfe observed in society. The Bonfire of the Vanities represents Wolfe's appreciation for minute and surprising details of American culture.

"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

"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

"Nasty, satirical, probing, and dead-on accurate . . . Wolfe falls so naturally into this colorful, supercharged account of New York high life and low life that it's hard to believe he hasn't been writing fiction all life . . . It also reads at a veritable gallop—those pages flash by you as you watch, with fascinated horror, the meticulously charted fall of Sherman McCoy."—The Seattle Times

"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

"Touches passionately on perennial themes that will give it staying power . . . Bonfire is news that will stay news because a century hence readers will find preserved in it the strong flavor of some unfortunately important slices of life in our time."—George F. Will

"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

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.

Vintage Tom Wolfe, 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)