The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Paperback

by Tom Wolfe (Author), Geoff Dyer (Introduction by)

Now featuring an introduction by Geoff Dyer, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a wild, psychedelic, utterly Wolfe-ian romp through the rise of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Tom Wolfe's seminal portrait of Ken Kesey, one of the most magnetic figures of the 1960s, and his band of Merry Pranksters. Along the way, even as Wolfe vividly recounts the group's infamous Acid Tests and the country's changing attitudes toward psychedelic drugs, he ropes in a who's who of the early years of the hippie movement, from the Hells Angels to the Grateful Dead to Allen Ginsberg.

Wolfe's clear, unblinking depiction of the travels, experiments, and exploits of his subjects have made his book the quintessential text in New Journalism, which he was instrumental in creating.

Readers will find an unparalleled examination of this pivotal moment in American history. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a prescient, evergreen classic, as groundbreaking now as it was when it first stormed onto the scene and forever changed what we thought nonfiction was capable of.

Author Biography

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of more than a dozen books, including 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. He is credited with coining the term "the Me Decade." Among his many honors, he was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.