The Real-Life Inspiration Behind The Bonfire of the Vanities

Stacked in the vaults of the New York Public Library’s grand main building at 42nd Street in Manhattan are 236 boxes detailing the personal and professional life of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated chroniclers of American society. It’s fitting that Tom Wolfe’s archive is housed in the heart of New York City; with The Bonfire of the Vanities, he wrote the definitive book on the 1980s, the decade when Wall Street’s masters of the universe—a Wolfe coinage—rose to dominate the economy and pop culture.

Wolfe brought a magnifying glass to his subjects, but he avoided being the subject of biographies or documentaries—until now. Filmmaker Richard Dewey’s Radical Wolfe, which premiered on Sept. 15 at IFC Center in New York, offers a glimpse into Wolfe’s depths. He spent many hours in the archive, as did The Big Short author Michael Lewis, whose 2015 Vanity Fair story was the inspiration for the film. In his article, Lewis describes how he dove into some of the boxes of papers that Wolfe, who died in 2018 at age 88, had sold to the library. These contained everything from to-do lists and readers’ letters to sample swatches of leather from London shoemakers.