Tom Wolfe - Author, Journalist - Biography.com “The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.” “A cult is a religion with no political power.” “I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.” Tom Wolfe Synopsis Tom Wolfe is a best-selling author and journalist, well known as a proponent of the New Journalism, using fiction-writing techniques in journalism. After earning a doctorate from Yale, Wolfe worked for newspapers before writing best-selling books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and his 1987 novel about urban greed and corruption, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Early Life Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, in a middle-class family. His father, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr., was an agricultural scientist, and his mother, Louise, a landscape designer. Both parents placed a high value on education and encouraged young Tom to pursue his early literary interests while he attended St. Christopher's School in Richmond. Wolfe turned down an offer to attend Princeton University and instead enrolled at Washington and Lee University, graduating in 1951 with a B.A.

in English. Briefly, he pursued a career in baseball and even tried out for the New York Giants, but was cut from the team. He then received his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University. Newspaper Journalist After college, Wolfe plunged into a decade-long career as a newspaper reporter, first with the Springfield Union in Massachusetts, and then The Washington Post. There he earned the Washington Newspaper Guild Award for Foreign News Reporting for his coverage of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Like many ambitious young journalists, Wolfe wanted to test himself in New York. In 1962, he signed on with The New York Herald Tribune and, with reporter Jimmy Breslin, wrote for the paper's Sunday supplement, which later was spun off as New York Magazine. The New Journalism During the New York newspaper strike of 1962, Tom Wolfe proposed an article on the Southern California hot-rod culture for Esquire magazine. He struggled with the angle and finally sent his editor a letter explaining his ideas, dispensing with traditional journalism conventions and describing the entire scene in a personal voice. The editor was so impressed that he removed the letter's salutation and published it in its entirety.

From this, Wolfe developed his own writing style, which became known as "the New Journalism." In this style, writers experimented with a variety of literary techniques, combining journalistic accuracy with a novelist's eye for description. At this point, Wolfe began transitioning from beat reporter to social commentator. In 1964, he wrote "The Last American Hero," about NASCAR driver Junior Johnson. In this article, he introduced the term "good ol' boy." The technique of creating new catch phrases such as "statusphere," "the right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" became a trademark of Wolfe's. In 1965, a collection of Wolfe's articles were published under the title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and quickly became a best seller. In the 1960s, Wolfe traveled the country, recording the social changes in America. Essays appeared regularly in Esquire, New York Magazine and Harper's.

In 1968, two of his books were published the same day: The Pump House Gang, a collection of essays, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a novelistic look at the counterculture, centering on the LSD-influenced antics of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on their coast-to-coast bus trip. Provocateur Besides being a journalist and novelist, Wolfe is also a provocateur, challenging prevailing notions. His book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) is a stinging account of a party given by Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party and of the practice of using racial intimidation to gain government welfare funds. In addition to his own efforts in New Journalism, Wolfe edited a collection of articles by other authors, such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, in a book entitled The New Journalism. In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of America's first astronauts. The book was adapted into a successful feature film in 1983.

In 1985, Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities, a portrayal of the money-obsessed, sex-seeking, power-hungry residents of urban New York. Wolfe has staked his career on the idea that all human beings are controlled by a quest for status. In his three novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons, he explores male power-jockeying by individuals who suffer from feelings of inadequacy or inflated egos, sometimes alternating between both. Considered a political conservative because of his attacks on liberal individuals and causes, Wolfe sees his role in the tradition of John Steinbeck, Emile Zola or Charles Dickens, documenting contemporary society. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us ! Citation Information Tom Wolfe » Read an Excerpt Purchase this book from Macmillan Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan.

When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy of New York in the last years of the twentieth century, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's gallery ranges from Wall Street, where people in their thirties feel like small-fry if they're not yet making a million per, to the real streets, where the aim is lower but the itch is just as virulent. We see this feverish landscape through the eyes of McCoy's wife and his mistress; the young prosecutor for whom the McCoy case would be he answer to a prayer; the ne'er-do-well British journalist who needs such a case to save his career in America; the street-wise Irish lawyer who becomes McCoy's only ally; and Reverend Bacon of Harlem, a master manipulator of public opinion.

Above all, we see what happens when the criminal justice system-gorged with "the chow," as the Bronx prosecutor calls the borough's usual black and Latin felons-considers the prospect of being banded a prime cut like Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel, but it is based on the same sort of detailed on-scene reporting as Wolfe's great nonfiction bestsellers, The Right Stuff, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And it is every bit as eye-opening in its achievements. It is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis-the kind of fiction strangely absent from our literature in the second half of this century-that reinforces Tom Wolfe's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Reviews "A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go." -The New York Times Book Review "Brilliant . . ." -People "Impossible to put down . . ." -The Wall Street Journal "Delicious fun . . ." -The New York Times "A smash . . ." -Philadelphia Inquirer "Richly entertaining .

. ." -Washington Post Book World "It's the human comedy, on a skyscraper scale and at a taxi-meter pace . . ." -Newsweek Great cast! Great director! Why did that movie flop? - CNN.com Great cast! Great director! Why did that movie flop? By Todd Leopold, CNN Updated 1:38 PM ET, Mon October 28, 2013 Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Sometimes a movie seems to have everything -- a great cast, solid director, even some early buzz. But when it's finally released, it falls short -- either at the box office or with critics, and often with both. Take 2013's "The Lone Ranger," with Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. It attempted to revive an old hero and instead found catcalls and relatively poor returns. At this point, don't expect a franchise.

Hide Caption 1 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – The just-released "The Fifth Estate" had a rising star -- Benedict Cumberbatch -- a good director and a topical plot, but it hasn't paid off with audiences or many critics. Hide Caption 2 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990), starring Tom Hanks and directed by Brian DePalma, is testament to how the best-laid plans can go awry. Tom Wolfe's sprawling novel would seem to have the makings of a great movie, and on paper, the film's credits were all solid. But some miscasting and internal problems did "Bonfire" in, and it flopped with both critics and audiences. Hide Caption 3 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "All the King's Men" (2006), a version of the Robert Penn Warren novel about a corrupt Southern governor, suffered from odd casting -- co-star James Gandolfini may have been a better fit for the lead than Sean Penn -- and sank quickly. The 1949 version, incidentally, won best picture.

Hide Caption 4 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – A remake of the 1951 classic, the 2008 version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" starred Keanu Reeves in the Michael Rennie role. A talented cast, including Jennifer Connolly and Kathy Bates, couldn't save the film. Hide Caption 5 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "Mars Needs Moms" (2011) was based on a popular Berke Breathed children's book, but the screen version "was too effects-driven, and based on a rather frightening plot premise for a PG-13 audience: your mom will be abducted by Martians," says film historian Wheeler Winston Dixon. It made back less than one-third of its $150 million budget and scored just 37% on RottenTomatoes.com . Hide Caption 6 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "The Wolfman" (2010) had a terrific cast -- Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins were among the performers -- and was based on a surefire horror character.

But a number of internal problems, including changing directors and reshooting the ending, doomed the result. Hide Caption 7 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "John Carter" (2012) was expected to be a huge hit. Instead, it was a divisive failure. Even the marketing was questioned: the original Edgar Rice Burroughs character was "John Carter of Mars," but the "Mars" part was cut because it was thought to turn off women. Hide Caption 8 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Kevin Costner had a huge success with "Dances With Wolves," and a qualified one with "Waterworld." But "The Postman" (1997), based on an award-winning novel, proved to be a blockbuster too far. "Goofy and pretentious," wrote Roger Ebert. Audiences agreed. Hide Caption 9 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Oscar winner Russell Crowe. Oscar winner Ridley Scott. A bestselling book by Peter Mayle. What could go wrong? For the comedy "A Good Year" (2006), quite a bit.

Critics thought it was too leisurely; audiences mostly stayed away. But the scenery was nice. Hide Caption 10 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "The Fortune" (1975) starred Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. It was directed by Mike Nichols. The script was by Oscar winner Carole Eastman (under the pseudonym "Adrien Joyce"). But the throwback farce split critics and didn't appeal to audiences. Perhaps Eastman's name change should have been a clue. Hide Caption 11 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – As a director, Clint Eastwood has had plenty of success, but for many "J. Edgar" (2011), was a mild misfire. Among other things, the age makeup on Leonardo DiCaprio (as J. Edgar Hoover) and Armie Hammer (as Clyde Tolson) came in for ridicule . The film's expected honors never materialized, and the box office was so-so. Hide Caption 12 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel "The Great Gatsby" has stubbornly resisted being made into a great film .

The 2013 version got mixed reviews from critics, though it did well at the box office. The 1974 version, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, carried very high hopes, but was strangely inert. Hide Caption 13 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "Heaven's Gate" (1980), Oscar winner Michael Cimino's follow-up to "The Deer Hunter," had grand ambitions. Instead, it became the poster boy for directorial excess, including the sheer amount of film shot -- reportedly 1.3 million feet, or 220 hours. It's undergone some critical re-estimation, but not enough to overcome its reputation. Hide Caption 14 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Another symbol of excess, 1987's "Ishtar," has also improved with age. But at the time of release, the film suffered -- not least because of high expectations for a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty and directed and written by Elaine May.

Hide Caption 15 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – "Cloud Atlas" (2012) was one of those films that tried very hard to live up to its intricate source material -- in this case, David Mitchell's award-winning novel. The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer directed a cast headed by Tom Hanks. Some critics thought it did well; others called it the worst film of the year . But worse for its backers, the film had a mediocre performance at the box office. Hide Caption 16 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Something about Philip Roth's work tends to resist first-rate moviemaking. OK, "Goodbye, Columbus" (1969) was a success, but "The Human Stain" (2003) was earnest at best, and "Portnoy's Complaint" (1972) -- which starred "Columbus" actor Richard Benjamin and was written by Ernest Lehman -- was awful. "A true fiasco," wrote Roger Ebert. Hide Caption 17 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – Even Steven Spielberg misses the bulls-eye from time to time.

"Always" (1989), with Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter and Audrey Hepburn, was a remake of 1943's "A Guy Named Joe." The general critical view was that it was unexceptional, and though it had a profitable box office run, it was no blockbuster. Hide Caption 18 of 19 Photos: Movies that missed Movies that missed – A Nicole Kidman film with big ambitions and a blockbuster budget, "The Golden Compass" (2007), didn't measure up to Philip Pullman's book -- but that was the least of its problems. Pullman's anti-religious themes were blunted and the film tried to cram a lot into its 113 minutes. Interestingly, it was a huge hit in Europe -- but not enough to prompt any studio from taking on the second and third books of Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Not yet, anyway.

Hide Caption Movie Review - - Review/Film; A Master of the Universe Brought Down to Earth - NYTimes.com Review/Film; A Master of the Universe Brought Down to Earth By VINCENT CANBY Published: December 21, 1990 THE value (and fun) of Tom Wolfe's long, Dickensian-detailed, tirelessly satiric novel, "The Bonfire of the Vanities," is in its democratic approach to ridicule. All men are born trashy. Those few who aren't have trashiness thrust upon them. No one entirely escapes Mr. Wolfe's scorn in his withering, moralistic tale about opportunists running amok in New York City in the mid-1980's. They are all there, everyone you might have met at a Park Avenue dinner party or (if you aren't invited to Park Avenue dinner parties) read about in the gossip columns or on page 2 or 3 of the tabloids. The cast is big. It includes even those who are viewed as supporting players on the edge of the screen in the television coverage of a scandal.

Wall Street wizards, ambitious politicians, their flunkies, Harlem punks, society women who are see-through thin, ministers with an eye for the main chance, interior decorators, fashionable poets, discarded wives, mistresses on the prowl, plus the cops, the stretch-limo drivers and the other faceless, functional people who service them. They are white, black, gentile, Jewish. Mr. Wolfe is an equal-opportunity chronicler of the absurd. His New York City is fictional, though it closely resembles the one over which Edward I. Koch presided as Mayor, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the pace setters in the White House. "The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a historical novel about a time and place in which everything and everybody had a price. This ecumenical approach is what gives "Bonfire" its tone. By being consistent, the novel transcends its own cynicism to become healthily skeptical. This is just what Brian De Palma's gross, unfunny movie adaptation does not do. The story is a good one.

Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks), a well-born successful Wall Street bond salesman, sneaks off to meet his mistress, Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith), when she comes into Kennedy Airport from Italy. On the way back to town, they take the wrong exit from the Triborough Bridge, winding up in unknown reaches of the Bronx, fearful for their lives as well as for his very expensive, showy imported car. After many twists and turns, they come to a lonely dead end where, while they are stopped, they're threatened by two young black men. There's a scuffle. With Maria behind the wheel, they make a desperate getaway, leaving one man badly hit as they run. From this small beginning, and faster than an ailanthus tree in a vacant lot, a giant scandal grows. When the feckless Sherman, self-styled "master of the universe" for his wheeling and dealing on Wall Street, is arraigned on hit-and-run charges, he becomes everybody's ticket to fame, fortune, community influence or political office. The racist Jewish District Attorney Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), who wants to be Mayor, sees the case as his chance to convince black voters that he is no racist.

The Reverend Bacon (John Hancock), a militant black clergyman, becomes the adviser to and spokesman for the injured man's family. While hospitalized, the injured man himself (Patrick Malone) is made over into a symbol of the city's oppressed, a dedicated scholar and victim of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heedlessness. Orchestrating much of the hoopla is Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a reporter for a tabloid called The City Light, who uses the story to save his job and then blows it up into a series that wins him a Pulitzer Prize. This is the plot, or the bones of it, anyway. It's a touchy one, with something to offend everyone. The novel works, at least in part, because it is so comically rude and so minutely detailed. In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original. As if to echo the novel's overstatement, and to tell the audience that what it's seeing is truth exaggerated, Mr.

De Palma and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, favor the use of lenses that give ordinary people the faces of gargoyles, and oddball camera angles that suggest a horror film more often than a social satire. The sets are alternately too much -- too fancy -- and too little, that is, utterly realistic. The movie never seems to know what it's supposed to be. It wobbles. The casting isn't ideal. Mr. Hanks comes off best as the bewildered victim. He's nobody's idea of a prototypical Yale man, which is the way he's described in the novel, but he's a good comic actor. It also helps that Sherman McCoy, a sort of late-20th-century Candide, is required to do little more than respond to the viciousness of others. Mr. Willis and Miss Griffith play their roles as straight as possible, but still seem to be cyphers. Their roles are flat, but without having the clear-cut definition of the cartoon figures that surround them. This is why the members of the supporting cast seem so much more vivid. They play one-dimensional comic types who get on and off fast: Mr. Abraham, Kim Cattrall (Mr.

Hanks's socially proper wife), Saul Rubinek (an ambitious but dimwitted assistant district attorney), Robert Stephens (a publisher possibly suggested by Rupert Murdoch). Off in left field somewhere is Morgan Freeman, who appears as the movie's conscience, an invention of Mr. Cristofer and Mr. De Palma. He is the black judge (in the novel, he is Jewish) who, at the end of the film, delivers an upbeat sermon on justice (also an invention) devised to deny the validity of just about everything that has gone on before. There's nothing especially wrong with the words, but they don't fit the movie they're in. More surprising is what seems to be the film's technical flaws. There are times when the dialogue sounds disconnected from the speaker, as if post-synchronized. Some scenes are awkwardly staged, including the initial confrontation in the Bronx. In one brief love scene, Miss Griffith's body appears to be so perfect as to look surgically reconstructed. Perhaps not, but "The Bonfire of the Vanities" is so wildly uneven that everything in it seems open to question. "The Bonfire of the Vanities" has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).

It includes partial nudity and vulgar language. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES Directed and produced by Brian De Palma, screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe; director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond; film editors, David Ray and Bill Pankow; music by Dave Grusin; production designer, Richard Sylbert; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 125 minutes. This film is rated R. Sherman McCoy . . . Tom Hanks Peter Fallow . . . Bruce Willis Maria Ruskin . . . Melanie Griffith Judy McCoy . . . Kim Cattrall Jed Kramer . . . Saul Rubinek Judge White . . . Morgan Freeman Reverend Bacon . . . John Hancock Tom Killian . . . Kevin Dunn Henry Lamb . . . Patrick Malone District Attorney Weiss . . . F. Murray Abraham Sir Gerald Moore . . . Robert Stephens Tom Wolfe About Tom Wolfe Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He was educated at Washington and Lee (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., American Studies, 1957) universities.

In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter on the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union. This was the beginning of a ten-year newspaper career, most of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960 he served as The Washington Post's Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild's foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba. In 1962 he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (Jimmy Breslin was the other) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald-Tribune's Sunday supplement. While still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he completed his first book, a collection of articles about the flamboyant Sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism.

In 1968 he published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang , made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970 he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second portrayed the inner workings of the government's poverty program. Even more controversial was Wolfe's 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word . The art world reacted furiously, partly because Wolfe kept referring to it as the "art village," depicting it as a network of no more than three thousand people, of whom about three hundred lived outside the New York metropolitan area.

In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine , which included his well-known essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." In 1979 Wolfe completed a book he had been at work on for more than six years, an account of the rocket airplane experiments of the post World War II era and the early space program focusing upon the psychology of the rocket pilots and the astronauts and the competition between them. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.

"The right stuff," "radical chic," and "the Me Decade" (sometimes altered to "the Me Generation") all became popular phrases, but Wolfe seems proudest of "good ol' boy," which he introduced to the written language in a 1964 article in Esquire about Junior Johnson, the North Carolina stock car racing driver, which was called "The Last American Hero." Wolfe had been illustrating his own work in newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, and in 1977 he began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper's Magazine called "In Our Time." The book In Our Time , published in 1980, featured these drawings and many others. In 1981 he wrote a companion to The Painted Word entitled From Bauhaus to Our House , about the world of American architecture. In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987.

A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million. In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter-as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s. In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States.

An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, A Man in Full , was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. A Man in Full headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover.

The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid gloves-along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one-provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. In October 2000 Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled Hooking Up. It included Ambush at Fort Bragg and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons , is now available in paperback from Picador. Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe A novel by Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities is a masterpiece, a riotous, exuberant and passionate epic that captures the greed and corruption of eighties New York and examines it under the microscope of Wolfe's famed satiric wit. Sherman McCoy, Wall Street wunderkind, seems to have it all; a salary like a telephone number, a home on Park Avenue, a beautiful wife and child, a mistress, a Mercedes. He is a Master of the Universel But then he gets lost one dark night in the Bronx, and his mercedes hits something. That something turns out to be Henry Lamb, a young black man who is now in a coma; for Sherman meanwhile, everything is about to unravel so fast he will hardly have time to change his thousand dollar suit... NYTimes November 1, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: By FRANK CONROY; Frank Conroy is the author of ''Stop-Time,'' an autobiography, and ''Midair,'' a collection of stories.

Lead: LEAD: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES By Tom Wolfe. 659 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19.95. Text: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES By Tom Wolfe. 659 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19.95. NOW comes Tom Wolfe, aging enfant terrible, with his first novel, (his first novel!), six hundred and fifty-nine pages of raw energy about New York City and various of its inhabitants - a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go. As in much of his other work, such as ''The Right Stuff,'' Mr. Wolfe's strategy is to somehow batter the reader into submission, using an incantatory repetition of certain emblematic phrases, (HIS FIRST NOVEL!), detailed description of people's clothing, hyperbole, interior monologue whenever he feels like it, and various other New Journalism devices he is apparently too fond of to give up. What is amazing is that he gets away with it.

I read ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' straight through, in two sessions on two consecutive days, and enjoyed it enormously. It swept me right up. When he writes about process he knows what he is writing about, whether it's the Wall Street bond market, the Bronx District Attorney's Office, print and television journal-ism, or the working habits of sleazy lawyers -the man knows how to prepare and he knows how to research. As well, he knows how to tell a story, and how to make us laugh, qualities not always present in the work of some of the more polished, more literary or ultimately more ambitious novelists of his generation. The novel relates the fall of Sherman McCoy, an investment banker making a million a year who seems blind to everything except appearances, sex and money. He lives in the middle of New York City without knowing New York City. He seems barely to know his decorative wife, his decorative daughter or his libidinous mistress, to say nothing of himself.

He's all surface is Sherman, and when he blunders off the expressway into the welfare jungle of the South Bronx in his $48,000 Mercedes, into the biggest trouble of his heretofore charmed life, he is without reserves of experience, imagination or moral awareness with which to guide himself. All he's got is adrenalin and fear, fear and adrenalin. He's a sort of carefully bred white rat in Dr. Wolfe's urban laboratory of horrors, destined to run mazes and endure shocks for our edification and amusement. (His first novel!) The action jumps back and forth from upper-class Sherman, or to borrow some lingo from the recording industry, from Sherman's track, to the Criminal-Justice-System-in-the-Bronx track - involving assistant D.A. Kramer (a working slob), Judge Kovitsky (burnt out), various cops and other marginally middle-class types - to the corrupt media track, involving the degenerate newspaper reporter Peter Fallow (writing for a thinly disguised New York Post), to the venal lower-class black track and the hypocritical and aptly named Reverend Bacon. There are dozens of minor characters on each track, and Mr.

Wolfe does a fine job of keeping them all under control and in clear focus, while the major characters spiral in on each other toward the final explo-sive courtroom scene. Mr. Wolfe writes in such a way as to make us read him quickly. Very quickly. (Indeed, if one lingers over the pages the sensation is something like hearing a 78 r.p.m. record played at 33 1/3. One perceives the structure, but misses the essence.) Fast as it is - like falling downstairs, sometimes - the pace is superb, and the action, twists of plot, comic setups and jumps from track to track always occur at just the right times. The plot is simple. Sherman screws up and the dark forces of the city close in on his rich white butt - but the presentation, or the attenuated revelation of the plot, is admirably complex, and allows for the weaving in of much interesting ancillary material. Mr. Wolfe never cheats the reader. He works hard to get every last bit of juice from every scene, every situation. And yet, when the author has let go of your lapels and the book is over, there is an odd aftertaste, not entirely pleasant.

Maybe he doesn't entirely get away with it. HOMOPHONIC attempts to recreate regional or class accents are only irritating. '' 'N thin mibby nuthun'' seems clumsy rather than Southern. ''Muh uhms uh shakin'' seems strained. Nor is the urban black speech, Long Island WASP or New Yorkese any better. Mr. Wolfe misses, it seems to me, because of a tendency to embrace the grotesque. It is the fact of an accent, rather that the quality or nature of it, that interests him. Elmore Leonard, for instance, goes after the sound and rhythm of certain accents, and does it very well without any tortured spelling. (So does James Baldwin, for that matter.) Mr. Wolfe writes with another agenda, with a kind of malicious glee, and exaggerates in order to make fun of his characters, with whom, truth be told, he has not much sympathy. What they say is fine -the dialogue is fine - but I wish he'd just let them say it, and let my own ear do the work. The relentless writing about clothing becomes tiresome.

As new characters enter the narrative we are immediately told, at length and in elaborate detail, what they are wearing, as if the key to an understanding of their souls might emerge from that information. Again, malice is involved. Sherman, in his $1,800 imported suit and British hand-lasted shoes is, ipso facto, an arriviste and a poseur. A detective wearing ''a sport jacket and the sort of brown pants a wife might choose to go with it'' has obviously delegated too much authority. Professors wear ''rotting tweeds,'' blacks wear running shoes. Everyone is slightly absurd. Mr. Wolfe seems unable to imagine a character who gets dressed simply to avoid being naked. The clothes are always understood to be a choice, a statement, expressing some folly or character flaw or some lie. There is so much about clothes, about appearances, that the author runs the risk of being understood to say that's all there is. In what is otherwise a fine scene in one of the best extended sequences in the book, Sherman is in a holding cell with some tough Latinos and blacks: '' 'Yo! Look at me when I'm talking to you!' ''Sherman turned his head toward him.

Pure malevolence! '' 'I ask you for a drink, and you wasn't nice, but I'm going to give you a chance to make up for that . . . see . . . I'm feeling cold, man. I want your coat. Gimme your coat.' ''My coat! my clothes! ''Sherman's mind raced. He couldn't speak. He shook his head no.'' Considering the sorts of things Sherman might reasonably be expected to be worrying about in such a situation this seems less symbolic than anticlimactic. Mr. Wolfe will forgive me if my mind does not reel in shock at the prospect of Sherman losing his jacket. In an epilogue, written as a New York Times story printed a year after the action of the novel, Mr. Wolfe tries to make the point that Sherman is a changed man, now the hounded creature of the criminal justice system. ''Mr. McCoy, 39, was dressed in an open-necked sport shirt, khaki pants, and hiking shoes. . . .

in sharp contrast to the $2,000 custom-tailored English suits he was famous for.'' Novelists often try to show us how people have changed by describing what they do or say. Mr. Wolfe makes gestures in that direction, but he always falls back on appearances, on descriptions of surfaces. As it turns out, it doesn't matter if we believe Sherman has changed (which is lucky, because we don't). It is enough that we believe he went through the fire. The odd aftertaste may be in part because there aren't any people in the book who seem to exist independent of the author's will, no one with enough depth to surpass his or her accent, clothing, class or situation, no one for whom believable change is possible. They are all victims of fashion or other surface forces. The fun of the book, and much of its energy, comes from watching Mr. Wolfe eviscerate one pathetic character after another.

And he is good at it, really brilliant sometimes - whether it be a society matron or a Jewish business tycoon making money running charter jets to Mecca for Arabs - but after a while, when it turns out that everyone is pathetic (except for me and thee, of course), the fun can turn sour. Malice is a powerful spice. Too much can ruin the stew, and Mr. Wolfe comes close. But in the end everyone is going to read the book, and no one is going to ask for any money back. It positively hums with energy. There are dozens of fine scenes, set pieces, a strong story line, lots of laughs and a solid, psychologically penetrating piece of imaginative writing about Sherman going into the slammer. ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' (an earlier version of which ran in serial form in Rolling Stone magazine) may be closer to R. Crumb than to Theodore Dreiser, but it satisfies. It definitely does it to you, and isn't that what it's all about? CHARGE OF THE NEW BREED At Seventy-ninth Street and First Avenue the taxis lined up every day to take the young Masters of the Universe down to Wall Street. . . .

It was a ten-dollar ride each morning, but what was that to a Master of the Universe? Sherman's father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even now, at the age of seventy-one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls' necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren't going to drive him off the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman's breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used.

''If you want to live in New York,'' he once told Sherman, ''you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate,'' meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars? From ''The Bonfire of the Vanities.''

Question: Who wrote the 1987 novel 'The Bonfire of the Vanities'?
Answer: Tom WOLFE