Page from manuscript draft of The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe was a literary trailblazer who electrified journalistic prose for nearly six decades. As a pioneer of New Journalism and proponent of social realism, his innovative writing style—whether defining the cultural zeitgeist or satirically skewering pretension and hypocrisy—propelled readers into the story through the immersive techniques of his reportage and fiction. He was also a skilled draftsman, and his manuscripts are replete with drawings embedded within his text or at the margins. This is a single page from the voluminous manuscript of The Bonfire of the Vanities, which appeared serially in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984. Published in full in 1987, Wolfe’s debut novel ruthlessly dissected the excesses and tensions of 1980s New York.