Vanity Fair is a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in installments in 1847-48. In a darkly comic manner, it tells the story of the adventuress Becky Sharp, satirizing the follies of bourgeois and aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century England. The title "Vanity Fair" is taken from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and the novel borrowed from that evangelical classic: Becky is like Pilgrim while Thackeray is akin to Faithful.
Vanity Fair is also the name of glossy, high-end magazine in the United States.