Special Coverage The Photo IssueThe Must List2008 Fall TV2008 Fall Movies2008 Fall Music
Page 2 of 3

This revolutionary New Journalism (collected in best-sellers like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) quickly made him the most famous nonfiction writer in America. At the time, he claimed no interest in becoming anything more. He even wrote an essay in 1972 proclaiming that journalism had supplanted the novel as the true literature of the 20th century--then nearly proved the point with his best-selling 1979 space-race saga The Right Stuff.

Still, a Bonfire burned within. Changing his mind about fiction, Wolfe set out to write the sweeping social novel of his dreams. Bonfire ended up a huge hit, selling 750,000 copies in hardcover alone. Wolfe was so pleased with himself, he did the dumbest thing possible: He promised his next novel would be even better. "The biggest book in the world" were his exact words.

"That was one of my follies," he says now. "It was one of the reasons it took me so long to write A Man in Full. I did want to top Bonfire. It was a lot of pressure."

After taking a year off, he began sketching out some ideas. But sitting behind his enormous custom-designed mahogany battleship of a desk (complete with built-in tape recorder and pencil sharpener), he quickly found himself lost in a labyrinth of dead ends. "I took this very expensive trip to Japan because at one time I thought that might be a component in the book," he says. "And I spent a lot of time in the New York art market, which is a really sexy scene. All these art birds in little black dresses, crossing and uncrossing their gossamer legs. I still think there's great material there."

Wolfe at least knew where to find the heart of his new novel: From the beginning he wanted to set part of the book in the South. "I had visited these plantations in Georgia," he recalls, "and I saw a life of consumption more conspicuous than any in the whole country. These people had 6,000-foot asphalt runways on their plantations just so they could fly their private jets in for quail hunting. So I thought, Okay, I've got this milieu--what can I do with it?"

One suggestion came from Mary Rose Taylor, a well-connected friend of Wolfe's whose husband happens to be a real estate developer in Atlanta. "We were having dinner, talking about what his next book should be," she says, "and I told him he should write about real estate developers in Atlanta." She threw some dinner parties so Wolfe could study the breed up close. And from bits and pieces of Taylor's pals, Wolfe eventually assembled his novel's main hero, Charlie Croker, an aging, boorishly charming Atlanta titan whose reckless real estate gambles have left him nearly $1 billion in debt.

But just as the book was finally falling into place, Wolfe suffered the most serious setback of all. In August 1996, after finishing some push-ups in his Southampton summer home, he felt an odd sensation in his chest. He thought he might have pulled a muscle; he hadn't. Within days, he was wheeled into surgery for a bypass operation. "I was under tremendous stress over finishing the book," he says, "so I would say that had something to do with my heart attack. But the fact is my father had a heart attack at 65, my grandfather had an attack at 65, and my father's brother had an aneurysm at 65."


Page 2 of 3