During the Cambodian hostage crisis of 1994, Bingham and some other reporters were stopped at a roadblock. The soldiers, who usually demanded cigarettes in exchange for access, asked for money instead. Enraged, Bingham pulled out his new 9-mm. pistol. His terrified fellow journalists were not amused, and a formal letter of complaint was lodged against him by the president of the FCC.

Humiliated, Bingham left Cambodia soon afterward and didn't return for a year. He still maintained his interest in the country, however. Over one dinner at an Upper East Side French bistro, he told friends that he'd looked into assassinating the repressive prime minister Hun Sen. "He was deadly serious," says a friend. "He said he thought it would cost about $30,000."

Bingham's experiences in Cambodia would form the material of his first novel, which he started writing in 1997. Lightning on the Sun, which borrows heavily from incidents in his own life, is the story of a preppy heroin user in Phnom Penh who decides to move some dope bought from a loan-sharking massage-parlor owner to New York with the aid of his lovely Harvard-educated wife. "It's like Stone, Greene, even Joseph Conrad, for God's sake, and I don't throw around those comparisons lightly," says his editor at Doubleday, Jerry Howard. "This fellow was a real writer, not a spoiled kid."

Though he continued to travel to Cambodia each year until the end of his life, Bingham began to devote more time to literary pursuits in the U.S. In 1992, he teamed up with Beller and Pinchbeck and became the publisher of Open City, a journal that would give a voice to new writers while unearthing worthy ones from the past. Bingham proved an adept editor, rustling for hours through submissions, searching for new talent.

"The magazine was intended as a small antidote to the commercial, profit-making attitude that pervades New York today," says Pinchbeck. "We were moving toward a perfect Bloomsbury-like situation, with the idea that our books might not make a short-term profit but they would perhaps make a long-term one as people built their careers."

At a time when literature seemed increasingly irrelevant, Open City was a romantic throwback to another era when writers were as badass and potent as Internet moguls are today. But despite its noble intentions, Open City would become as famous for its parties as for its short stories by young writers like Mary Gaitskill, David Foster Wallace, and Martha McPhee. (In fact, the most press it received was for a poem titled "I Am a Pizza" written by Monica Lewinsky when she was 11 and published last year.)

Open City's popular parties attracted personalities from Chloe Sevigny to Matthew Modine to Katie Roiphe to spaces like downtown theaters or alternative art consortiums. Often, Bingham would host the events in his loft. "We wanted to create environments where people would just feel, 'Wow, this is the New York that I dreamed about when I was a kid, where anything is possible,' " says Pinchbeck.

Bingham's loft also became a hangout for all sorts of antics. "A year or two ago, at the dawn of e-commerce, Rob tried to buy a frozen duck online," recalls James Linville, co-editor of The Paris Review. "But he ended up with about a dozen frozen ducks. This being Rob, he called up all his friends and made it an occasion for a feast of ducks."

One novelist remembers stumbling into a bedroom to get her coat and finding Evan Dando strumming a guitar, surrounded by a claque of giggling editorial assistants. Open City parties were packed and hazy with cigarette and pot smoke; at one event, guests took turns doing lines of coke off of the cover of The Paris Review. Yet, even among this hard-living crowd, Bingham became noted for excessive drinking and drug use, and friends who had tendencies in that direction admit that they avoided his apartment when they were trying to stay on the wagon. People close to Bingham's family insist they had no idea about his drug use. Early on, however, they became concerned about his drinking and took pains to get him sober. In 1993, they prevailed on him to go to a rehab in Minnesota. Though he found the twelve-steps a bit earnest for his liking, he sporadically attended AA meetings for the rest of his life.

Vanessa Chase, the woman he would marry, was different from many of Bingham's girlfriends -- a fresh-faced blonde who grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a Rutgers professor. "She was very much the most-popular-girl-in-school, but she's completely open and friendly," says a friend. At Harvard, where she graduated with an art-history degree in 1991, she was a good student and, like Bingham, tremendously social: A resident of the conservative Eliot House, Chase was as much a fixture at cocktail parties as at lectures on medieval Italian church painters.