Money, race, discrimination, imprisonment—those factors that create inequality among people—are important concerns in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. Atlanta is an ideal setting for an examination of these concerns because of its late-twentieth-century development as a major metropolitan area, its critical black-white racial mix, and its lingering remnants of the old planter society. Always a transportation and financial center of the South/Atlanta underwent a transformation to metropolis in the 1970s and 1980s as it acquired a dramatic new office skyline downtown and a huge suburban surround. New money and a faster pace engendered plenty of opportunity for social mobility and its accompanying turmoil and resentment. Wolfe tells us that "Atlanta had never been a true Old Southern City such as Savannah or Charleston or Richmond, where wealth had originated with the land. Atlanta had been an offspring of the railroad...