From ‘Acid’ to ‘Bonfire,’ an Archive That Sizzles

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, May 20, 2014.

Excerpt:

In March 1988, when Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was parked at the top of the best-seller list, 962 Fifth Avenue was known to seemingly everyone as the gilded home of the mistress of Sherman McCoy, the book’s high-living investment banker protagonist.

Everyone, that is, except a woman lucky — or unlucky — enough to have just bought an apartment there.

“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,” the woman wrote in a letter to Mr. Wolfe, “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.”

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