About the book:
The definitive document of the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey's psychedelic road trip through 1960s America.
Wolfe's gonzo prose matches its subject perfectly chaotic, brilliant, and genuinely hallucinatory in places.
Condition:
Well worn secondhand condition.
Inscription on inner front cover.
Wear to cover and spine as pictured.
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About the author:
Tom Wolfe (19302018)
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and educated at Yale, Wolfe arrived in American journalism in the early 1960s and promptly broke it open. What he and a loose cohort of writers Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion developed became known as New Journalism: reportage built with the tools of fiction, using scene-by-scene construction, full dialogue, shifting point of view, and the dense recording of status detail to put the reader inside a world rather than describe it from outside. Wolfe was its most energetic practitioner and its chief theorist, editing the definitive anthology that named and codified the movement in 1973.
His prose is unmistakable exclamatory, italicised, relentlessly attentive to the markers of status and cool, mimicking the language and rhythm of whatever subculture he had immersed himself in. He had an anthropologist's instinct for the tribal and a satirist's instinct for the absurd, and he applied both to subjects that respectable journalism hadn't taken seriously: custom car culture, California surfers, LSD evangelists, Mercury astronauts, Wall Street traders. Status anxiety who's in, who's out, how desperately people perform their position was his grand unified theory of human behaviour, and he found evidence for it everywhere.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), his account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, is probably the definitive document of the American counterculture from the inside. The Right Stuff (1979), on the Mercury astronauts, is a masterpiece of sustained narrative non-fiction. The Pump House Gang the La Jolla surfer kids, the California scene, the generational rupture of the late sixties is Wolfe at his most exhilarated, catching a particular American moment mid-flight.
His fiction arrived late. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), first serialised in Rolling Stone, is a panoramic satire of 1980s New York Wall Street, the courts, the Bronx, the press in the mode of Thackeray and Dickens, his stated models. He was openly contemptuous of what he saw as the retreat of serious American novelists into autobiography and domestic miniature, and said so loudly enough to provoke public feuds with Updike, Mailer, and John Irving.
He was politically conservative, which made him an unusual figure in literary culture and sharpened his satirical edge he had no ideological home to protect. His influence runs through American long-form journalism, cultural criticism, and anyone who has tried to render a subculture from the inside with both precision and delight. He wore white suits his entire career. The suits were also the argument: style is content, performance is meaning, and no one gets to stand outside the status game.
