Remembering Tom Wolfe

His novels captured the spirit of Wall Street’s extraordinary new Gilded Age. The mystery is why so few have emulated him

- John Micklethwait

There are many reasons to praise Tom Wolfe, both as a novelist and as a journalist. If Charles Dickens defined Victorian London, then the capital of the world, Wolfe, who died on May 14 at 88, held up a similar mirror to modern America—and New York in particular. One of Wolfe’s less celebrated achievements was that he was a great novelist of finance—the only one that this frenzied era of moneymaking has produced.

The Bonfire of the Vanities was arguably the first great financial novel since Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Many eminent American writers have looked at the victims of Wall Street and broader capitalism, including Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck. But Wolfe was the first American one to look at the victors—the “Masters of the Universe”—like Sherman McCoy, who sold bonds for a living. Bonfire drills into their lives, their hangups and petty ambitions, enumerating their virtues and vices often literally (saying how much their clothes, apartments, and lunches cost).