Description

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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 counterculture movement of the 1960s, and his band of Merry Pranksters. Along the way, even as he vividly recounts the group’s infamous Acid Tests and the country’s changing attitudes toward psychedelic drugs, Wolfe 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 the New Journalism that 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.

About the Author

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Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like 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, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including The Last Days of Roger Federer, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Praise For…

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“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 essential book . . . the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter . . . Vibrating dazzle!” —The New York Times

“Some consider Mailer our greatest journalist; my candidate is Wolfe.” —Studs Terkel, Book Week

“A Day-Glo book, illuminating, merry, surreal!” —The Washington Post

“Electrifying.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“An amazing book . . . A book that definitely gives Wolfe the edge on the nonfiction novel.” —The Village Voice

“Among journalists, Wolfe is a genuine 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