The Bonfire of the Vanities

Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the critically acclaimed author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Bonfire of the Vanities is vintage Tom Wolfe at his best.

＂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

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s panoramic novel of the go-go New York City of the 1980s, has lost none of its furious luster. Its portrait of power (those who have it and those who want it) and the book’s dissection of racial tensions simmering below the city’s gleaming veneer have only grown more pointed with time. Wolfe is unblinking, lavish, gleeful, and damning in this larger-than-life vision of the ’80s, reinforcing his reputation as an unmatched chronicler of the twisted, contradictory, and glamorous abodes of power
and wealth.

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 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.