A Man In Full.

WOLFE, Tom.

Item Number: 136112

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

First edition of this “masterpiece” (The Wall Street Journal). Octavo, original illustrated boards. Presentation copy, warmly inscribed by author on the title page, “To Mary Broadbent from a fan of two generations of Broadbents, Tom Wolfe.” Near fine in a fine jacket. Jacket art by Daniel Lee. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell.

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia — a racially mixed, late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth and wily politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta conglomerate king whose outsize ego has at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 29,000 acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife, and a half-empty office complex with a staggering load of debt. “The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written — not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist. . . . The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting" (The New York Times Book Review).