Literary San Francisco: Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe' s 1968 best seller The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a record of the hippie movement that the New York Times Book Review likened to Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize winning The Armies of the Night, a historical novel of the Vietnam protest movement. Wolfe rode around with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in a bus driven by Kerouac cohort Neal Cassady. Wolfe's brilliant book details the road trip and acid parties, the "acid tests," given by the band of hippies and attended by Hunter S. Thomspon, Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, Wavy Gravy, and many, many other leaders and followers of the psychedelic movement. Two acid tests were given in San Francisco among others in Palo Alto, La Honda, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Portland, Oregon. The acid tests were the epoch of the psychedelic lifestyle. Wolfe is also the author of The Right Stuff, for which he was given the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award.

Other titles by Tom Wolfe
The Pump House Gang
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Man in Full


Copyright 2001 Hank Donat
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