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Stalking the billion-footed beast, by Tom Wolfe

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A literary manifesto for the new social novel

November 1989 Issue [Article] Stalking the billion-footed beast Adjust Share A literary manifesto for the new social novel by Tom Wolfe , M ay I be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of The Bonfire of the Vanities ? The novel’s main character, Sherman McCoy, is driving over the Triborough Bridge in New York City in his Mercedes roadster with his twenty-six-year- old girlfriend, not his forty-year-old wife, in the tan leather bucket seat beside him, and he glances triumphantly off to his left toward the island of Manhattan. “The towers were jammed together so tig

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