The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe is a 659-page hardcover published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Originally published in 1987, this copy is the third printing, 1998. The dust jacket has very minor shelf wear. Inside, the half-cloth cover and pages are pristine, clean and unmarked. The condition is very good.
Since its publication in 1987, The Bonfire of the Vanities has become the most talked-about novel of our time. In it Tom Wolfe captured the tension, the anxiety, the racial and ethnic antagonism, and, especially, the wild humor of modern urban life--and not only for New York, where the action takes place. In cities throughout America and Europe, the very name of the novel's main character, Sherman McCoy, has become synonymous with the grand follies of the 1980s. With extraordinary prescience, Wolfe has brought to life the hucksters and hustlers who are now familiar to city dwellers everywhere: the likes of Reverend Bacon, the media-manipulating Harlem activist; Peter Fallow, the alcoholic, omni-sponging British journalist; Tommy Killian, the criminal lawyer and star customer of the Favor Bank. The supporting cast is nothing less than the city of New York. Wolfe has illuminated both the poverty and the glamour of the city, plus the secret motivations--greed, envy, resentment, revenge--that inflame city life at every point of the social scale.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-84219
