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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe

Picador

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ISBN10: 031242759X
ISBN13: 9780312427597

Trade Paperback

432 Pages

$21.00

CA$28.00

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In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe tells the story of Ken Kasey and his followers—known as the Merry Pranksters—as they travel across the country in a school bus they named "Further." Originally published in 1968, Wolfe followed them on their adventures, declining their offers of the ever-present LSD, in order to document their own drug-induced insights and revelations. In this classic work of literary journalism, Wolfe recounts the trip first-hand and documents the Pranksters' experiences and their intellectual and spiritual insights.

Reviews

Praise for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

"Some consider Mailer our greatest journalist; my candidate is Wolfe."—Studs Terkel, BookWeek

"Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!"—Terry Southern

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the book . . . the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter . . . Vibrating dazzle!"—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

"A Day-Glo book; illuminating, merry, surreal!"—The Washington Post

"Among journalists, Wolfe is a geniune poet; what makes him so good is his ability to get inside, to not merely describe (although he is a superb reporter), but to get under the skin of a phenomenon and transmit its metabolic rhythm."—Newsweek

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an amazing book . . . A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the non-fiction novel."—Village Voice

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term “the Me Decade.”

Among his many honors, Wolfe was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.

Copyright Mark Seliger

New York Times Obituary