Everything about The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test totally explained
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a work of
literary journalism written by
Tom Wolfe early in his career in 1968. Using techniques from the genre of
hysterical realism and pioneering
new journalism, he tells the story of
Ken Kesey and his band of
Merry Pranksters as they drive across the country in a
DayGlo painted school bus dubbed "
Furthur," reaching what they considered to be personal and collective revelations through the use of
LSD and other
psychedelic drugs. It covers their cross country road trip, as well as the
Acid Tests, early performances by
The Grateful Dead, and Kesey's exile to Mexico. Wolfe is primarily concerned not with narrative, but with relating the Pranksters' intellectual and quasi-religious experiences.
Tom Wolfe's influences
Though Wolfe didn't indulge in the same frequent drug use as the subjects in his work, he was intrigued by their experience and attempted to capture their state of mind and frequent revelations. To do so, he used extensive interviews and primary texts including many interviews, letters, and recordings from
Ken Kesey,
Norman Hartweg, and
Robert Stone (among many others) to re-create not only the story of the Merry Pranksters, but the "
subjective reality" of their experience, which relates obviously to Kesey's philosophizing of
intersubjectivity. Far more controversially, Wolfe used (and vaguely cited) the research of
Hunter S. Thompson, who encountered the
Merry Pranksters while writing his own nonfiction novel on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Unlike Wolfe, Thompson was a friend to Kesey, before and after all of these publications. Wolfe seems to write just as maniacally as someone who would have been “on the bus", while his "[recreation] of" his subject's "subjective reality" is occasionally interrupted by his "impersonal and objective" narrator's self-inclusion. Wolfe's infrequent first-person recounting creates the underpinning dynamic between subject and journalist in the novel, which establishes Wolfe as a medium of the acid culture to what he calls "the outside world," in a form which he was concurrently establishing as a medium of journalism within a greater medium of literature.
Mentioned in Acid Test
Film adaptation
A film adaptation of the book, directed by
Gus Van Sant, is expected to be released in 2009. The screenplay is written by
Big Love writer
Dustin Lance Black, and the movie is being produced by
Richard N. Gladstein.
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test'.
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