Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — the founding document of New Journalism and the defining portrait of the early 1960s psychedelic counterculture.
New Journalism founding text: Wolfe participates in and reports on the Pranksters' bus trip and Acid Tests from inside — using techniques from fiction (shifting point of view, interior monologue, vivid scene-setting) to capture subjective experience. Ken Kesey as a character more compelling than any of Wolfe's fictional creations. The Acid Tests as the origin of the counterculture. The Grateful Dead, the Hell's Angels, and the encounter with the Beats.
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