In the late eighties, he was hired as a city reporter at the New York Post, but, to his mother's relief, he was fired after just three months, shortly after "Pistol Packing Baby," his story on a gun-wielding child, made the front page. Bingham's interest in more upscale literature began much earlier; at Groton, he rowed crew in the mornings and wrote short stories in study hall at night. A dormmate remembers him dramatically reading his stories aloud, to the dismay of classmates who wanted to be sleeping.

Brown University, with its Manhattan prep-schoolers and flashy Euros, at first proved disappointing to Bingham, and he often spent weekends at Trinity College, which most of his friends from Groton attended. One morning during his sophomore year at Brown, Bingham was in the Beef and Bun diner with classmates when a friend drew everyone's attention to that day's Times, which featured a story about the $440 million sale of his family's newspaper empire to Gannett. "Rob just shrugged it off, like, 'Oh, my family's really fucked up,' you know, in a don't-be-jealous-of-me way," says a friend. In private, however, he was upset at losing his chance to run the business. "It was very eerie," Bingham told Brenner, after the sale. "I cried a little bit. It was like the end of the dream."

Two years later, in his senior year, Bingham moved in with six new friends -- including Tony Mamet (David's brother) and Internet pioneer Nicholas Butterworth -- sharing a crumbling Victorian house off campus. The house is remembered by classmates for its lavish parties in the basement, the door to which the landlord kept closing up -- and which they kept prying open. Bingham shuttled between his attic bedroom and a den filled with mountains of pizza boxes, broken furniture, and a television that never went off, drinking Jim Beam straight from the bottle.

Nearly everyone he knew was moving to New York after graduation, so he did, too, into a Seaport apartment that he shared with four friends. After six months, somehow unable to find a job, he decided to go down South to cover the police beat in Nashville for the Tennessean, where he remained for a year. "It was a time of great intoxication, adherence to punk-rock principles (drunk, we'd watch Gone With the Wind with the stereo turned up)," he wrote of his experience there. "I slept with a Vanderbilt co-ed whom I actually called Trixie -- and to her face. There was also a fellow reporter I fucked frequently in my car but for whom I cared very little."

After these inconsequential affairs, Bingham took off once again, landing in Kentucky to work on the senatorial campaign of Dr. Harvey Sloane, a Democrat long supported by his family. As always, Bingham threw himself enthusiastically into the task, traveling with Sloane for months in a twin-engine prop plane, familiarizing himself with the sleepy cities and strip-mined mountains of the state he would have lived in had his father not passed away.

Over dinner at an Upper East Side bistro, he told friends that he'd looked into assassinating Cambodia's repressive prime minister. "He was deadly serious," says a friend. "He said it would cost about $30,000."

Sloane's campaign fizzled, though Bingham labored mightily to persuade his grandmother Mary to write the candidate a check. To plead his case, he knelt before her in the Big House, where she sat in a tea gown with Plutarch's The Fall of the Roman Republic open on her lap. Unfortunately, her donating $75,000 later backfired when Bingham confided the details to a reporter over too many martinis. It turned out that the donation violated campaign-finance laws on soft money, and the matriarch was subjected to a five-year investigation by the Federal Election Commission and threatened with a lawsuit.

Embarrassed by the incident, Bingham fled Kentucky and came back to New York, where he entered Columbia's Writing Program. During this time, he became involved with a coterie of young writers, including Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck, who would later become his partners in Open City. "He fell in love with that whole scene," says a family member. "He wrote constantly. It was the first time he felt people could really respect him as a professional writer."

That summer, he took a self-exploratory trek through Southeast Asia. A year later, he went back again and ended up in Phnom Penh. It was 1991, and the Cambodian capital had been opened for the first time in a peace agreement that brought $2 billion in aid to the region -- and with it, U.N. aid workers and eager young reporters. "It was a journalistic 'golden age' for Cambodia, with foreign correspondents converging on a country the way ambitious sportsmen had flocked to the Alps nearly a century and a half earlier," wrote journalist Barton Biggs.

Bingham first camped out at the crumbling Renakse (Khmer for "justice") Hotel on the Boulevard de Lenin, just opposite the Royal Palace, and began work on an article about the Khmer Rouge for The New Yorker. When he wasn't working, he played tennis with friends at the International Athletic Club, on courts that he excitedly noted had been the site of beheadings of government officials during the Khmer regime. One day, while exploring the penthouse of the hotel, he stumbled into Biggs, who was working on an English-language paper called the Cambodia Daily. Bingham enthusiastically pitched in.

He would work intermittently at the Daily without pay for six years, enlisting friends from the States and befriending the Cambodian staff. "Robert is the reason I am a journalist," says Ek Madra, a high-strung ex-Daily reporter whom "Mr. Rob" hired as his personal assistant on the condition that he take Valium.

When he wasn't working, Bingham could usually be found drinking at a dingy bar named Heart of Darkness or at his regular table at the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC), the nexus of expat social life. Drugs and sex were cheap and plentiful. He bought a two-bedroom loft overlooking the Mekong River, where he hung out with a crowd denigrated by other expats as slumming prep-schoolers.