Michael M. Thomas, an acerbic columnist and novelist who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them — people he dismissed as “social climbers, stock market papermongers, real estate shills and assorted other virtuosos of hype and blather” — died on Aug. 7 in Brooklyn. He was 85.
He was being treated in a hospital for complications of arthritis and died of a bacterial infection, his wife, Tamara Glenny, said.
Mr. Thomas, who was the scion of an old-line family and who inhabited the upper echelons of Manhattan society, had three distinct careers: assistant curator of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, investment banker at Lehman Brothers and, finally, writer. While he loved art history and immersed himself for a time in the world of high finance, it was with his pen — dipped, some said, in an inkwell of acid — that he found his groove.