The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
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For a start, Kesey's own life with the Merry Pranksters is perhaps the consummate example of a phenomenon that, in 1968, baffled the national imagination: the transformation of the "promising middle-class youth with all the advantages" into what was popularly known as "the hippie." Ken Kesey was more than promising. He was a Golden Boy of the West—a scholar, actor, star athlete & one of the outstanding novelists of his generation—when he burst forth as an experimenter with powerful new hallucinogenic drugs, leader of the Merry Pranksters, &, finally, fugitive from the FBI, the California police & the Mexican Federales.
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Tom Wolfe, a journalist already widely known for his exuberant portraiture of the American Bizarre, plunged into the psychedelic world of the Pranksters, emerging with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a now-classic portrait of the coterie which gave the hippie world of the 60s much of its philosophy & vocabulary. He recounts their romp across America in the 1st psychedelic bus, their alliance with the Hell's Angels, their Be-elzebubbling takeover of a Unitarian Church convention, their conversion of the biggest anti-Vietnam rally of all time into a freak-out, their zany games of hide-&-seek from the law in two countries—all with a depth of exploration & a stylistic inventiveness which make The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test one of the most memorable journalistic odysseys of our time.
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