It offered a tense, gripping page-turner of a story it had a colorful, well-nigh Dickensian cast of characters and it portrayed these people’s duplicities, hypocrisies, and superficial values with wit and precision, pulling back a curtain on the complex political workings and unwritten social codes of the metropolis that was, at the time, the planet’s economic engine. Set in what Wolfe, in its opening pages, described as the “greatest city of the 20th century,” it took readers on a lively, fast-moving tour of New York City at its highest and lowest-from Wall Street brokerages, Park Avenue penthouses, and posh Manhattan bistros to the grungiest Bronx slums, courtrooms, and jails. 1 New York Times bestseller for eight weeks. To say that it was a once-in-a-decade success may be an understatement. T was 30 years ago that Tom Wolfe published his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
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