A Man in Full: A Novel

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Apr 1, 2010 - Fiction - 742 pages

Tom Wolfe's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES defined an era and established Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. In his #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist, A MAN IN FULL, the setting shifts to Atlanta, Georgia—a racially mixed late-century boomtown teeming with fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians."

Don’t miss the star-studded mini series adaptation of A Man in Full–coming soon to Netflix.

Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.

The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.

A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

 

Contents

Prologue Capm Charlie
3
Chocolate Mecca
17
The Saddlebags
34
Turpmtine
59
Beige Half Brothers
90
The Suicidal Freezer Unit
108
In the Lair of the Lust
134
Hello Out There 7Eleven Land
158
The Aha Phenomenon
419
The Trial
441
Mais Army
466
The Real Buckhead
493
Chambodia
514
The Deal
544
Gridiron Heroes
573
Starring Darwell Scruggs
592

The Lay of the Land
179
The Superfluous Woman
207
The Red Dog
234
This Is Not Right
249
The Breeding Barn
276
The Arrest
311
Gods Cosmic Joke
324
The Rubber Room
341
Gotcha Back
370
Epictetus Comes to Da House
395
Holding Hands
604
The Screen
618
The Spark of Zeus
636
Epictetus in Buckhead
652
The Bull and the Lion
668
Roger Black
690
The Manager
711
A Man of the World
729
Copyright

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About the author (2010)

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

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