![]() Wolfe was, for many years, part of the ‘New Journalism’, which embraced other key American writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S Thompson. ![]() It is as relevant in the early part of the 21st century as it was in those earlier days of excess, and the problems of class and race that it dissects remain salient. Previously serialised (in the style of Charles Dickens’s writings) in 27 parts in Rolling Stone, it is a big, high-octane satire on the wealth and apparent immunity from worldly cares enjoyed by the Wall Street bankers and bond traders - the Masters of the Universe - and on greed, social posturing, racism, corruption, newspaper publishing, and the political and legal world of Manhattan. The Bonfire was published in 1987, one week before the Wall Street Crash. ![]() The practice of burning books regarded as subversive found its chilling modern expression in the burning of works by Proust, Mann, Marx, and Einstein by Nazi stormtroopers in Berlin in the 1930s. The title of Tom Wolfe’s Dickensian masterpiece is taken from an event that occurred in Florence in 1497, when supporters of the radical Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola publicly burnt piles of books, cosmetics, and works of art - objects of luxury that might act as temptations to sin. ![]()
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