In 1989, two years after "Bonfire of the Vanities" was published, Tom Wolfe wrote a 10,000-word essay for Harper’s. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” was, Wolfe wrote,  “a literary manifesto for the new social novel” and a shout-out for literary realism.

After World War II, Wolfe argued, “Among the fashionable European ideas that began to circulate was that of ‘the death of the novel,’ by which was meant the realistic novel. Writing in 1948, Lionel Trilling gave this notion a late-Marxist twist that George Steiner and others would elaborate on. The realistic novel, in their gloss, was the literary child of the nineteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie.  It was a slice of life, a cross section, that provided a true and powerful picture of individuals and society – as long as the bourgeois order and the old class system were firmly in place. But now that the bourgeoisie was in a state of ‘crisis and rout’ (Steiner’s phrase) and the old class system was crumbling, the realistic novel was pointless. What could be more futile than a cross section of disintegrating fragments?”

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