Here's Tom Wolfe's Draft Outline For "The Bonfire Of The Vanities"

When Tom Wolfe prepared to write his first novel, he had a lot to prove. Wolfe had made a name for himself with high-profile articles like “Radical Chic” and books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff. Along with his compatriots like Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson, he had developed a new style of reportage -- the New Journalism -- that embraced a strong voice and sense of immediacy. They sought to inhabit the minds of their subjects and communicate this perspective through extensive dialogue and descriptions of their clothing, surroundings, and mannerisms -- details that Wolfe called their “status life.” These were techniques adopted from authors of fiction, but Wolfe was dismissive of the contemporary state of the novel, at various times calling it dead, retrograde, and generally unwilling to engage with and respond to the cultural moment.

So much was Wolfe identified with this criticism that within his personal papers is an anonymous postcard from 1972, stating “Dear Tom: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Love, THE NOVEL.”

But by the 1980s, Wolfe had decided to embark upon his own novel. His starting point was not characters or plot, but setting -- New York City. Inspired by the social commentary woven into the writings of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, and William Makepeace Thackaray, he wanted a novel of “intense social realism,” which he termed the “journalistic” or “documentary” novel.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a meditation on greed, corruption, racial conflict, and self-interest told through a cast of universally-flawed characters. At the outset of the novel, wealthy, white Sherman McCoy and his mistress are driving in the South Bronx, where they hit Henry Lamb, a young black man, and flee the scene. This action sets off a chain of consequences, as Lamb becomes comatose from his injuries, and the district attorney’s office and tabloid press seek to use the collision to advance their own careers. “People are always writing about the energy of New York,” Wolfe said. “What they really mean is the status ambitions of people in New York. That’s the motor in this town. That’s what makes it exciting -- and it’s also what makes it awful many times.”

To gather realistic details, Wolfe sat in on court hearings (leaving his trademark white suit at home), but then found himself in the position of many authors: piles of research but no book. To light a (bon)fire, Wolfe decided to once more take a page from Dickens and publish serially. The Bonfire of the Vanities initially appeared biweekly in Rolling Stone from July 1984 to August 1985. After this grueling schedule, Wolfe took his “very public first draft,” as he called it, and significantly rewrote the text for its book version, published in 1987. While switching genres, Wolfe retained his signature punchy voice, with Harper’s Index gleefully tabulating 2,343 exclamation points in the finished work.

The Tom Wolfe papers at The New York Public Library provide unique insights into Wolfe’s development as an author, as well as his research and writing process. This manuscript page from the collection is one of the over 250 items that will be on display as part of the Library’s permanent Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures, opening Friday, September 24th, 2021.

On this particular page, Wolfe has begun outlining the overarching plot of Bonfire. From the notation “The excitement of bond trading, his financial picture,” we can tell that this is part of the draft for the book iteration of Bonfire, as it was here that Wolfe changed Sherman McCoy’s occupation from writer to the more thematically-resonant bond salesman. In the margins are Wolfe’s playful drawings, often found amidst his drafts and correspondence.

As a postscript, Wolfe needn’t have worried about the reception for his book: The Bonfire of the Vanities was a resounding critical and commercial success, encouraging Wolfe to devote significant time to fiction and publish a string of novels over the next 25 years.

This story is part of our partnership with the NYPL around the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures. The exhibition includes objects spanning 4,000 years from the Library's research collections. Free timed tickets are now available here. We'll be publishing one NYC-related object a day throughout September, and you can see everything at gothamist.com/treasures.