Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was an American journalist turned novelist. From his native Virginia, Wolfe went to Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., and finally to New York, where he wrote for The New York Herald Tribune and Esquire. Wolfe’s essays and articles were to be published in collections including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. There were critiques of contemporary art and architecture, and a book on the first American astronauts, The Right Stuff. Between 1984 and 1985 he published an early version of The Bonfire of the Vanities in serial form for The Rolling Stone. The novel was further researched and revised, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1987, becoming a bestseller and remaining the work with which Wolfe is most associated. Eleven years later, after some health problems and a novella called Ambush at Fort Bragg, came A Man in Full.
The story has five principle characters: Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate developer close to bankruptcy, and a “good ol’ boy” (a phrase Wolfe claimed to have coined); Roger White II, a black lawyer and “Morehouse Man” with the nickname Roger “Too White”; Raymond Peepgass, a senior loan officer at the Atlanta-based PlannersBanc with a love child and a litigious ex-mistress; Martha Croker, Charlie’s first wife, former socialite and now a dedicated aerobics student; Conrad Hensley, an employee at the Croker Global Foods Warehouse in Contra Costa County, California, a young husband and father. The plot is somewhat complicated. At its center is an accusation of rape made by the daughter of a major Atlanta businessman, Elizabeth Armholster, against Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon, star running back for the Georgia Tech football team. The accuser is white, the accused black. A mayoral election approaches, and Atlanta’s constituencies are largely defined in racial terms. Money and reputation are at stake, both subject to politics, but in the end there is also the matter of integrity. Croker is called upon to intervene in the affair, a tricky ask because of his friendship with Elizabeth’s father.