Tom Wolfe
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
Author: Tom Wolfe
Genre: Nonfiction (History/Deep Telling)
Book Summary:
Tom Wolfe arrives late on the scene in 1967 just as Kesey is being freed on bail for two marijuana arrests. His history of the Merry Pranksters, a group of like-minded free-thinkers who gathered around Ken Kesey during the 1960s and helped usher in the Summer of Love and widespread use of psychedelic drugs by many young folk in some of the "hipper" communities on the West Coast, begins with Kesey planning a graduation from acid (i.e. LSD) and then steps back in time to 1958 and follows Kesey's indoctrination into the psychedelic scene up through the 60s and back to the Acid Graduation. Along the way, the reader learns much about how LSD was first used recreationally and the role Kesey played in its growing use--especially in and around San Francisco. Kesey had first tried LSD as a volunteer in the Veteran's Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, where the government was experimenting with psychedelics and other drugs on willing subjects. Kesey immediately saw a need to take the LSD experience out of the laboratory and began securing doses of LSD and peyote for his friends in Perry Lane graduate student housing area of Stanford University. Following the publication of his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962, Kesey took royalty monies and purchased a secluded cabin in La Honda, California. He invited members of the "hip" Perry Lane scene to join him and soon began attracting other like-minded "intrepid travellers". This group of people became known as the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters, according to Wolfe, were instrumental in introducing numerous folk to LSD--including the Hell's Angels. Later, they staged the infamous Acid Tests in San Francisco and Los Angeles, huge LSD parties with strobe lights, Day Glo, music by the Grateful Dead, and more that brought LSD to the attention of the American public in a way that shocked many--even pontificates of the drug like Timothy Leary. SPOILER: In the end, the Haight-Ashbury community that Kesey's Pranksters, in a sense, helped spawn disowned him. His Acid Graduation was considered by many to be a failure, and, following a six-month sentence on a California work farm, Kesey returned to Oregon with his wife and children.
Geographical Setting: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and La Honda, California; Mexico
Time Period: 1958-1968
Appeal Characteristics:
The primary appeal of this book is its "insider" view of the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey circa 1962-1967. Wolfe, the originator of the term 'new journalism' has created a fevered and inspired account based on lengthy interviews with many who either knew Kesey, were Merry Pranksters, or who attended the Acid Tests. Kesey is a bridge between the Beats and Hippies, primarily through his association with Neal Cassady, the locus of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. Cassady had befriended Kesey back in the Perry Lane days and drove the famed bus of the Pranksters, Further, on their monumental trek to New York in July of 1964. Wolfe's writing style, as he admits in the "Author's Note" that closes the book, is intended to help "re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality" of life with the Pranksters. This includes creative use of line breaks, punctuation, grammar, and poetry. Wolfe will even begin writing in first person about events at which he was not present. But this does not distract from the veracity of wolfe's account. The pace is leisurely, not quick. Wolfe uses a cliché method of telling his story, i.e., beginning at the end and then "flashing back" to the tale's beginning, but this helps to drive the story forward as the reader can't help but wonder how Kesey went from wrestling star, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to renegade flag-bearer of the Hippie generation.
Read-alikes: There are many avenues one could take after reading this booking. If you enjoy Wolfe's writing, try his better known books, The Right Stuff (1979), which details the U.S. space program, and Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which discusses Wall Street culture in the age of Reagan. His book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) put Wolfe on the map and deals with counter-culture in the early 1960s. Wolfe's prose (and place among the luminaries of New Journalism) brings to mind the work of another chronicler of 1960s counter-culture, Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson's book Hell's Angels (1966) is referenced by Wolfe and parts of it detail the parties Kesey hosted at La Honda at which the Hell's Angels were the guests of honor. His next major book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), is a reflection on the excesses of the 60s and the age of Nixon. Even Keroauc's On the Road (1957) would make a good suggestion as both Kerouac and Wolfe's book focus on motion forward with Neal Cassady at the wheel in both instances. Those interested in learning more about the history of drug use during the 1960s should track down Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1985) and Jay Stevens' Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987). Other major personalities of the time include Timothy Leary, Emmett Grogan (founder of the Diggers), and the Grateful Dead. Try Leary's autobiography Flashbacks (1983), which includes a section on his meeting with Kesey. For more on Grogan, try his autobiography Ringolevio (1972). And for more on the place of the Grateful Dead in the Haight-Ashbury scene, try Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip: the Inside History of the Grateful Dead (2002). For pictures and more of the Pranksters and Kesey, explore the unofficial website; Paul Perry, Ken Babbs, & Neil Ortenberg's On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture (1990), and Ken Kesey & Ron Bevirt's The Further Inquiry (1990).
Red Flags: Glorification of drug use, especially LSD and other psychedelics; language
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