It’s understandable that he had no interest in resurrecting this formative work. He may have been a writer in 1984, but a bond trader is exactly what Sherman became in the revised version.īut ultimately, as Wolfe no doubt knew, it’s merely an example of a great nonfiction writer learning how to write fiction – and fumbling through it all in a very public manner. But there are noteworthy delights for the Wolfe-obsessive buried within – in the final chapter, after Sherman McCoy’s trial, his apartment was sold to a “thirty-seven-year-old bond trader, for $2.2 million”.

The plot – never Wolfe’s strongest suit – is undeniably shambolic, with countless dead ends and loose threads. It’s definitely the Great Stuff.” This was the confirmation I’d been waiting for – forget Hitchens, I put my faith in Doug. Doug Robinson of Colorado proclaimed: “The worst thing about Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire Of The Vanities was that there were only a couple of chapters. This process took months, but I came across a reader’s letter in the September 1984 issue that convinced me it was all worthwhile. While my wife-to-be was organising lavender centrepieces, I was hunkered down in the box room, working out how to extract DJVU files into PRN files so I could convert them into JPEGs. Around this time, I was engaged to be married, with the big day looming. I wasn’t willing to read it on a rickety old laptop, so the next step was extracting the images to collect together as an ebook. Undeterred, I dug out an ancient laptop and finally saw the first pages of the book I’d spent the past year tracking down. They used an obsolete viewing format that immediately crashed any modern PC. I eagerly handed over the £40 price tag for a used copy – I was saving £460! By chance I discovered the Rolling Stone archives had been released on CD-rom, back in 2007.

Bonfire and the vanities