The Bonfire of the Vanities - by Tom Wolfe (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

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

About the Author

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of more than a dozen books, including such contemporary classics as 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. He is credited with coining the term "the Me Decade." Among his many honors, he was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.