When it came to tapping the American Zeitgeist, the brats could not compete with Tom Wolfe. Nor did the media uproar surrounding them touch that generated by Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Wolfe, who had virtually invented New Journalism in the 1960s and coined the phrase "The Me Decade" in the 1970s, provided in The Bonfire of the Vanities both a comic novel of manners and an entertaining time capsule of New York life in the 1980s. Readers throughout America responded, often with outrage, to Wolfe's depiction of the racial clash between white yuppie Manhattan financier Sherman McCoy (self-proclaimed "Master of the Universe") and Reverend Bacon of the Bronx, who manipulates public opinion to win justice for a poor black youth McCoy has inadvertently killed. With his trademark breathless, often purple prose, Wolfe effectively skewered the...