The Bonfire of the Vanities

Wolfe's panorama of 1980s New York runs on the distance between its worlds. Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader who thinks of himself as a Master of the Universe, lives in a Park Avenue duplex and takes a wrong turn off the expressway into the South Bronx, where his mistress hits a young Black man with his car. The fallout pulls in the Bronx County Courthouse, a Harlem preacher, and the tabloids, and the map is the city's fault lines laid end to end.

Sherman McCoy

Sherman McCoy's Park Avenue duplex

Chapter 1

The book opens in the duplex that certifies Sherman as a Master of the Universe: the two-storey marble entrance, the decorator wife, the mortgage that quietly devours his million-dollar income. It is the height from which the rest of the novel drops him.

Chapter 1

inspired by Sherman's ten-room apartment is invented but sited squarely on upper Park Avenue in the East 60s–70s, the address that stands for everything he believes about himself; placed on that stretch of the avenue.

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