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Macmillan Childrens Publishing Group
The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A Novel

Tom Wolfe

Picador

The Bonfire of the Vanities
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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)

National Book Critics Circle Awards - Nominee, National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, National Books Critics Circle Awards - Nominee

Prologue: Mutt on Fire

"And then say what? say, 'forget you're hungry, forget you got shot inna
back by some racist cop-Chuck was here? Chuck come up to
Harlem-'"
"No, I'll tell you what-"
"'Chuck come up to Harlem and-'"
''I'll...

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Praise for The Bonfire of the Vanities

“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

Reviews from Goodreads

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of 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. 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 the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.

Tom Wolfe

image of Tom Wolfeo
Copyright Mark Seliger

Tom Wolfe

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