In the first week of January 1977, most of New York’s staff walked out. Capitalizing on friction between the magazine’s board of directors and its co-founder Clay Felker, Rupert Murdoch had bought it out from under him. A large portion of Felker’s staff quit in solidarity, and a couple of employees even made an attempt to stop the magazine from publishing the next week by hiding the pasted-up pages. Eventually a portion of the team came back, someone caved and returned the missing pages, and they put out an issue, although the events listings carried a note reading, “Because of production difficulties, certain listings may be out of date.” You bet there were difficulties.

Tom Wolfe was done writing for New York for a long time thereafter, publishing most of his subsequent journalism to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. There he serialized what may be his two best books: The Right Stuff, his definitive history of the early days of space flight, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, his equally definitive novel set in 1980s New York gone nuts.

But he did not stay away from us forever. Murdoch sold the magazine in 1991, and a couple of owners later, in 2004, New York began a period of reinvigoration under a new editor, Adam Moss. Among his missions was to recover the high energy and spirit of Felker’s magazine and recapture it in a contemporary print-and-digital form. A recognition of that comeback came in 2007, at the National Magazine Awards, the industry event that for, glossy publications, paralleled the Pulitzer Prizes. New York, three years into its new era, was nominated for seven awards and won five, a clean sweep of its perpetual competitor The New Yorker. Wolfe was the one who telephoned Felker — who by then was gravely ill, in a nursing home recovering from pneumonia — that night to relay the great news.

When Felker died the following year, at 82, Wolfe sent him off with a genuinely epic obituary, one that oozes respect and affection without being hagiographic. It’s a splendid memoir of the best days of magazine-making, a fine bookend to the 1972 story we featured here a couple of weeks ago. He makes a pretty good case that a big swath of the New York City we know is partly a reflection of the magazine Felker and his team made. Are you always curious about the next young power broker coming up through the political system, the next restaurant you and your friends will want to patronize, the next show or club or consumer object or artist that will be the talk of New York? You are, in more ways than you may know, reflecting the interests and inclinations of Clay Felker and his editorial view of the world.

Wolfe wrote one last piece for us after that, and I can conclude this Reread mini-series by telling you about it firsthand. Some years ago, I wrote a book about the history of Polaroid photography. In the process, I got to know a photographer named Marie Cosindas who worked mostly on instant film. She’d made a portrait of Wolfe in 1966, and he was taken with her and her work, so much so that he contributed a long appreciative essay to her first book of pictures. When she died in 2017, I emailed Wolfe to find out if he wanted to write something about her. He said he’d love to, agreed to a deadline, then went quiet for a couple of weeks.

I had a sense that age was slowing him down — this was less than a year before he died, and he’d looked frail in some recent photographs — and I began to think I wouldn’t see the story. Then one day my phone rang, and there was that soft cordial voice, recognizable from so many interviews and talks he’d given over the years. “I wanted you to know I’m on it,” he said by way of explanation, chuckling slightly, and we talked a bit about Marie, whom we both remembered as a unique and slightly strange bird. Not long after that, his manuscript arrived in my inbox, and you can read the charming result here. I’m pretty sure it’s Wolfe’s final published work.

Thanks for joining us for this round of Reread. We’ll be taking next week off before we begin our next series, which will focus on one of our favorite aspects of city life. Tell your friends to sign up.