He did so, he admits, partly to prove to himself and his critics that he had it in him, but also because of his dismay at what he saw as the collective failure of American novelists to tell the stories of their age. Later, explaining his novel in a Harper’s essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A literary manifesto for the new social novel” (1989), he wrote:

Half of the publishers along Madison Avenue . . .  had their noses pressed against their thermopile glass walls scanning the billion-footed city for the approach of young novelists who, surely, would bring them the big novels of the racial clashes, the hippie movement, the New Left, the Wall Street boom, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam. But such creatures it seemed, no longer existed . . . The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis, or any other big, rich slice of contemporary life.

Here Wolfe is stretching his point somewhat. Vietnam, for example, spawned dozens of novels. But his sense that something was lacking in American writing drove him on. His novel about New York “should be a novel of the city, in the sense that Balzac and Zola had written novels of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London, with the city always in the foreground, exerting its relentless pressure on the souls of its inhabitants”.

Wolfe-the-novelist got things off to a Dickensian start, writing The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serialisation in Rolling Stone magazine, running fortnightly in 27 instalments beginning in 1984. The result, which Wolfe called “a very public first draft”, was reworked and published in a single volume in 1987. The book was a publisher’s dream, pleasing (most) critics and becoming a bestseller. True to Wolfe’s intentions, The Bonfire of the Vanities is a wide-angle look at Eighties New York, in which two sides of the city, rich and white, black and poor, collide when bond trader Sherman McCoy takes a wrong turn on the way back from collecting his mistress from JFK.

One letter in the archives is an unlikely testament to the novel’s success. It is from a real-life resident of 962 Fifth Avenue, the address of self-proclaimed master of the universe McCoy: “As a very private person who wishes to remain that way and who has no taste whatsoever for the kinds of flashy lifestyles which you describe, I am embarrassed and ashamed when friends gleefully inform us that our new address is in your book and has become a rather notorious one.”

Open the Bonfire boxes in the NYPL and it is clear that Wolfe means it when he says:

[The] task, as I see it, inevitably involves reporting, which I regard as the most valuable and least understood resource available to any writer with exalted ambitions, whether the medium is print, film tape or the stage. Young writers are told, “Write about what you know.” There is nothing wrong with that rule as a starting point, but it seems to get quickly magnified into an unspoken maxim: The only valid experience is personal experience.