*Top,* Carlos Barragán and Sarah Anderson; *above,* Julia Vitale and Patricia Clarkson.

*Top,* the Lambs Room at Keens Steakhouse; *above,* Jason Yarmosky and Katie Holmes.

*Top,* the prizes, replicas of Tom Wolfe’s trademark homburg; *above,* Parker Posey.

*Top,* Adam Eli and Sloane Crosley; *above,* Caroline Calloway.

*Top,* Stephanie Danler; *above;* Patricia Clarkson, master of ceremonies.

*Top,* Emily Ratajkowski; *above,* Nancy Bass Wyden and Lynn Nesbit.

*Top,* Hunter Abrams and Sarah Hoover; *above,* Andrea McCoid, Alexa Schilz, and Sylvain Costof.

*Top,* Parker Posey and Patricia Clarkson; *above,* Sheila Wolfe, Alexandra Wolfe Schiff, and Drew Schiff.

*Top,* Sarah Anderson accepting her award; *above,* Madeline Cash and Zoe Dubno.

*Top,* Jay McInerney and Lynn Nesbit; *above,* Adam Klappholz, Stephanie Danler, Emily Ratajkowski, and Romain Gavras.

*Top,* Josh Duboff, Dana Brown, and Joseph Bullmore; *above,* Jim Kelly, Lynn Nesbit, and Sheila Wolfe.

*Top,* Jasmine Vojdani and Adam Eli; *above,* Ian Van Wye, Carlos Barragán, and Zoe Dubno.

*Top,* Matthew Gasda; *above,* Juliette Jeffers and John Lippman.

*Top,* Elena Clavarino and Kiara Barrow; *above,* Josh Duboff, Molly Jong-Fast, and Karah Preiss.

*Top,* Candace Bushnell and Sloane Crosley; *above,* Matt Starr and Caroline Calloway.

*Top,* Paul Needham and Marie Solis; *above,* Patricia Clarkson, Victoria Herman, and Carolina de Armas.

*Top,* Paulina Prosnitz and Jack Sullivan; *above,* Carole Radziwill, Victoria Herman, and Jane Sarkin.

*Top,* Michael Hainey; *above,* the Lauren Schofield–designed Tom Wolfe cake, based off an illustration by Robert Risko.

A Night Celebrating Sarah Anderson and Carlos Barragán

At a dinner hosted by AIR MAIL and Montblanc, Patricia Clarkson, Parker Posey, Katie Holmes, and Jay McInerney toasted the winners of the second annual Tom Wolfe literary prizes

By Maggie Turner

Photographs by Daniel Paik

The crowd that filled the storied Lambs Room at Keens Steakhouse on Tuesday evening could be best described by Tom Wolfe himself. “They were… well, Beautiful People! - not ‘students’, ‘clerks’, ‘salesgirls’, ‘executive trainees’ - Christ, don’t give me your occupation-game labels,” he wrote in his 1968 counterculture chronicle, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.” (Or, as master of ceremonies Patricia Clarkson put it with no less verve, “an illustrious, literary, yummy, divine, sexy-ass crowd!”)

These days, that “robot junkyard” Wolfe wrote about decades ago feels more prevalent than ever, as artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated by the day and menaces the very sanctity of human writing. Bullshit may reign, but it was nowhere to be seen as the literary world and its greatest champions gathered at the century-old chophouse for a dinner hosted by AIR MAIL and Montblanc in celebration of this year’s Tom Wolfe Prizes for Fiction & Reportage.