![]() ![]() "How could I proceed with my plan?" he wrote. But not long after the early chapter was published, a real-life "wolf pack" descended on a tightly wound subway-rider, Bernhard Goetz, who proceeded to shoot four young black men. One of his characters, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, rides the subway, "his eyes jumping about in a bughouse manner." In a future chapter, the author had planned to explain the young man's subway-phobia: he had once been attacked and robbed by a "wolf pack" of thugs on a train in the Bronx. ![]() ![]() He wanted to capture the grisly carnival of New York City in the mid-1980s: roiling, putrescent New York, bubbling with irreconcilable ethnic hatreds, wobbling between unimaginable wealth and horrifying squalor, exploited by cynical pols, money-grubbers and charlatans. But Wolfe's ambition was as much reportorial as imaginative. Novels are not supposed to be tripped up by the morning's headlines. He was only halfway through when his story was overtaken by events. Tom wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984 -85. ![]()
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