Read Wolcott -- and just about everyone who reads and writes in New York reads him -- and you develop a mental image. His columns are debonair and worldly, etched with an economy of expression and employing startling juxtapositions. "I don't think there's anyone smarter than Jim reviewing for the last twenty years," says David Denby. "He can see the contradiction in things in a way that can be quite breathtaking."

He carries his erudition lightly but swings it for maximum impact. For example, dig out the essay on TV's political pundits in the February issue of Vanity Fair and look for the dead-on parody of talk-show banter as if it were written by e. e. cummings. "His columns are templates of how to write criticism," biographer James Atlas says. "They have a muscular strength -- and they are laugh-out-loud funny."

It's easy to imagine Wolcott as a character in a Noël Coward play, standing in a drawing room dressed for dinner, casually belittling someone's talent as he absentmindedly lights a cigarette. Walcott's criticism -- the tone-setting and the delivery of blows -- is all done in the adjectives: succinct but biting summations that leave no room for consolation. (One writer's prose was described as "mentholated.")

"Everyone thinks I'm Addison DeWitt," Wolcott says of his reputation for coldhearted critical drive-bys. "If they only knew that I'm just a guy sitting alone at his desk playing with his big cat."

James Wolcott -- the person, not the writer -- is a cautious man. He likes to be prepared. ("You know, he goes over those columns endlessly, trying out every possible alternative for each word, so when you get his copy, it's perfect," says Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter.) Sitting in the back booth at the Odeon, an eighties literary hangout that suits his victims -- McInerney and Ellis -- more than it does him (he chose it because he likes booths), Wolcott is pinned behind the table by his alarming girth. "I'll have a Coke and maybe I'll order some dessert later," he tells the waitress.

"I think he felt jostled and outclassed at The New Yorker," says Tina Brown. "At Vanity Fair, there's no one else to muscle in on his territory."

The most striking thing about Wolcott is, despite his large size, how small-scale he is. He's humane and genial, approachable, not confrontational. Wolcott tells funny stories, ducking his head down and jutting his chin out to produce a comic tone as he mimics people, and offers reasoned but unemphatic opinions on writers, movies, and the general state of the culture. When the conversation turns to his background, he is frank and fearless about his modest roots.

Like most good New York stories, Wolcott's begins somewhere else: in his case, the suburbs of Baltimore. "My father was, in different times of his life, a bartender and a greenskeeper; my grandfather was a barber. We were a classic Kennedy-Catholic-Democratic household, where portraits of JFK and Jesus flanked each other on the living-room wall."

Not a likely petri dish for high-culture spores. But things really started to cook when he went to Frostburg State College in remote Western Maryland. He joined the student newspaper, and in his sophomore year he wrote an article about Norman Mailer's appearance with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show, and sent a copy to the author. Mailer responded, generously offering to write a letter if Wolcott were ever in New York looking for a job. In a daring and confident act, he immediately packed his bags, dropped out of college, and moved to Manhattan. A raucous career at The Village Voice followed.

The Voice was wide-open territory in the seventies, and Wolcott's potent combination of ferocious style and diffident personality positioned him to exploit the paper's opportunities. It helped that he arrived just before its legendary editor, Dan Wolf, left. "There were people literally walking the hallways as if they'd lost their mommy and daddy," he says. "They'd chew on a pencil and you would say their name and it was like they'd wakened from a dream: 'You're talking to me?' My feeling was, Dan Wolf was great but he's gone. Daddy's not coming back."

Wolcott wrote on any subject he could get his hands on: politics, punk rock, television. New York in the seventies also proved an ideal place to school oneself. He moved easily from Lincoln Center, where he first got turned on to Baryshnikov and the ballet, to CBGBs, where he would catch the Talking Heads or the Ramones till three in the morning. During this period, Pauline Kael picked up something he'd written and the two became friends. Wolcott proudly refers to himself as a Paulette, but that hasn't stopped him from taking an ax to a host of her disciples. ("I'm of the school that to honor your mentors, you must break with your mentors," he says.)

"I admire him, he's a phenomenal autodidact," Denby, another Paulette, marvels. "He's learned from literature and journalism directly rather than from professors, which left him without any sense of false piety -- and he developed a very vigorous style that turns the surface of things into metaphor. He can describe a performance or a personality and gather it up into a superb visual caricature.

"But there's a problem with that," Denby continues. "He stays on the surface. He doesn't seem to me to make the next step. There is no cultural value to defend. The only terrible thing for him is to be boring. That's a pop aesthetic. He's got nothing to fall back on."

In the mid-eighties, he landed at the newly revived Vanity Fair. The job had a liberating effect on him. Vanity Fair seemed to give him a James Bond double-O license to kill.

But when Tina Brown took over The New Yorker in 1992, Wolcott went with her. It turned out to be a mistake. "He needed to shoot from the hip," remembers Knopf editor Deborah Garrison, his editor at The New Yorker. "There's a decorum there that was chafing."

"I think he felt jostled at The New Yorker," Brown says. "He felt outclassed by Anthony Lane, Adam Gopnik, and David Remnick. At Vanity Fair, there's no one else to muscle in on his territory."

"It's a great magazine with a great history," Wolcott says of his time at The New Yorker. "But I never wanted to be one of those people who hangs on just because that typeface is important to them. I was never one who touched the old walls and thought, Oh, the ghost of Benchley." Wolcott went back to Vanity Fair in 1996.