A Man in Full

Front Cover
Random House Publishing Group, Oct 30, 2001 - Fiction - 704 pages
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • “A masterpiece” (The Wall Street Journal) of a novel by the era-defining author of The Bonfire of the Vanities—soon to be a Netflix original limited series from David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) starring Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, and Diane Lane

“Wolfe is a peerless observer, a fearless satirist, a genius in full.”—People

The setting is Atlanta, Georgia—a racially mixed, late-twentieth-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.

Meanwhile, Conrad Hensley, idealistic young father of two, is laid off from his job at the Croker Global Foods warehouse near Oakland, California, and finds himself spiraling into the lower depths of the American legal system.

And back in Atlanta, when star Georgia Tech running back Fareek “the Canon” Fanon, a homegrown product of the city’s slums, is accused of date-raping the daughter of a pillar of the white establishment, upscale black lawyer Roger White II is asked to represent Fanon and help keep the city’s delicate racial balance from blowing sky-high.

Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real estate syndicates—Wolfe shows us contemporary turn-of-the-century America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him one of our most admired talked-about novelists.
 

Contents

Capm Charlie
3
Chocolate Mecca
15
The Saddlebags
31
Turpmtine
54
Beige Half Brothers
83
The Suicidal Freezer Unit
99
In the Lair of the Lust
123
Hello Out There 7Eleven Land
145
The Aha Phenomenon
389
The Trial
409
Mais Army
432
The Real Buckhead
457
Chambodia
477
The Deal
505
Gridiron Heroes
532
Starring Darwell Scruggs
550

The Lay of the Land
165
The Superfluous Woman
191
The Red Dog
216
This Is Not Right
230
The Breeding Barn
255
The Arrest
288
Gods Cosmic Joke
301
The Rubber Room
317
Gotcha Back
343
Epictetus Comes to Da House
367
Holding Hands
562
The Screen
575
The Spark of Zeus
592
Epictetus in Buckhead
607
The Bull and the Lion
622
Roger Black
642
The Manager
662
A Man of the World
678
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About the author (2001)

Tom Wolfe’s numerous books include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He died in 2018.

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