The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Wolfe Tom

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Wolfe Tom

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism.

This is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day.

"An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the psychedelic 1960s.

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was a founding member of the New Journalism movement and the author of modern classics including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He wrote for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine as a reporter, and is credited with coining the term The Me Decade. Tom received the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Achievement, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Outstanding Contribution to American Literature, among many other awards. He received his B.A. from the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. graduating with honors and a Ph.D. from Washington and Lee University.

at Yale University, where he majored in American studies. He was a New York City resident.