There are newspaper clippings, notes in shorthand, sketches and plans. For The Bonfire of the Vanities, he spent time in Bronx courts listening to cases, talking to lawyers and defendants and taking books of notes. In one box is a letter from someone who worked at a Bronx court. Francine Garb wrote: “I want to encourage you to take an interest . . . I am very familiar with your work, and this place and the goings-on, believe me, is just your stuff . . . Trying to sort it all out, get to the core, is like walking down a long labyrinth in a Fun House, attempting to focus and just getting those distortions back from the mirrors.”

New York’s justice system was not the last “labyrinth in a Fun House”  that Wolfe would navigate. In his three subsequent novels, he has grabbed thorny issues without flinching. In A Man in Full (1998) questions of status, wealth and race boil over in Atlanta. I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) concerns sex on campus. Back to Blood (2012) is set among Cuban immigrants in Miami.

Wolfe may feel his work is “going home”, but his papers sit uncomfortably alongside their august neighbours in the New York Public Library. The acquisition is a strange mark of respectability for a writer who, from “Radical Chic” onwards, has spent much of his career thumbing his nose at New York’s literary establishment, skewering the rich and famous for their hypocrisies and feuding fearlessly with some of America’s most respected writers.

A Man in Full was met with scathing reviews from three literary giants. Norman Mailer’s takedown of Wolfe’s kinetic style is hard to forget. Reading Wolfe’s weighty novel was, he said, like making love to a 300lb woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books. John Irving (The Cider House Rules) claimed he could open A Man in Full to any page and “read a sentence that would make me gag”. Wolfe’s novels are “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction,” he said.

Most temperate and perhaps therefore most damning was John Updike: “A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.” 

While their attacks evidently stung — Wolfe hit back in a vituperative essay boldly titled “My Three Stooges” — there was a sort of vindication for him buried in their criticisms. If they would not let Wolfe into the literary club because his work was “journalistic”, then they were proving the point he had been making throughout his career: that “serious” writers no longer saw it as their duty to report on the world around them.

Sift through the Tom Wolfe papers and you get a picture of a writer who, from Sixties hippies to Eighties “masters of the universe”, has been a correspondent on the frontline of American society, reporting on its changes, its absurdities and its hypocrisies — and in doing so, helping a country make sense of itself.