I found the invitation to the Bernsteins’ party in a box in the main branch of the New York Public Library. In another box is the notebook Wolfe took along: “Panther night at Leonard Bernstein’s” reads the title on its cover. There is also a letter from Bernstein’s sister Shirley, sent to Wolfe after “Radical Chic” was published, accusing him of working “as if on order from Messrs Agnew and Hoover” (Nixon’s Vice-President and the FBI chief) and blacklisting him from “all things radical”.

These artefacts are part of the Tom Wolfe papers, which the library acquired two years ago for $2.1 million. For that sum, Wolfe, now 82, has handed over the physical remnants of a lifetime’s work. After several years’ processing they became available to view earlier this year. In 219 boxes are his correspondence, notes, manuscripts, photographs and drawings. From his contributions to The Pine Needle, his high school newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, to the notes for his most recent work, Back to Blood, it is all there.

At the time of the acquisition, in 2013, Wolfe said he “couldn’t be more delighted. I’ve inhabited the New York Public Library so steadily since the very day I came to New York in 1962 to work — all of three blocks away — at the New York Herald Tribune, I feel like my archive is not moving anywhere. It’s going home.”

It is hard to think of a greater stamp of literary respectability the city could bestow on a writer. Ascend the stairs of the library’s imposing Fifth Avenue entrance, passing Patience and Fortitude, the marble lions that guard the doors, and you are entering the cathedral of literary New York. Its reading room, currently closed for restoration, is an inner sanctum long used by writers escaping the noisy distractions of the city outside. My particular pilgrimage takes me to the library’s Manuscripts and Archives division. Among its treasures are some 700 cuneiform tablets, hundreds of medieval illuminated manuscripts and renaissance documents, a copy of the Declaration of Independence annotated by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington’s Farewell Address (as well as his recipe for beer: “a larger sifter full of Bran Hops”, “3 gallons Molasses”). Researchers can read manuscripts and letters by Washington Irving, Herman Melville, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. With the library’s acquisition of his papers, this is the company Tom Wolfe finds himself in. He is now, officially, an Important Writer. 

It is odd thrill to sit in the hush of Room 328 and, while researchers next to you scour Civil War records, read a letter to Tom Wolfe from “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson about his new motorbike — “a lightweight Spanish bugger, built for dirt-riding” — or to open an envelope and find in it no note but a series of fabric samples in various creams and whites, sent to Wolfe, one assumes, by his tailor. (There is more than one shade of white suit.) There are letters from editors desperate for his work to appear in their pages (“we are always in the market for a piece by you on any topic whatsoever”) and invitations to lunch, including a 1989 request from a then little-known Michael Bloomberg to meet him and a group of bond traders: “Your portrayal of the ‘masters of the universe’ [in his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities] is certainly a subject with which they are quite familiar.”

Such pleasures will not be on offer for admirers of younger writers. Trawling through Jonathan Franzen’s Gmail account or downloading the contents of Zadie Smith’s hard drive in 50 years’ time will be a blander experience than rummaging through Wolfe’s papers. Letters are annotated and corrected, letterheads offer a glimpse of the correspondent’s whereabouts. Wolfe’s own sketches, doodles and scribbles in the margins of his notes and proofs put you there, next to him at the writer’s desk, struggling with a difficult sentence.