The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a novel written by Tom Wolfe that was published in 1968. In it, he tells of his adventures when traveling with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who were well known for their extravagance and their heavy use of LSD. It is written with a novelistic voice, and yet it was nonfiction. Through this mixture, Wolfe captures the spirit of the then-blossoming psychedelic movement, in a way of writing that was also beginning to blossom in journalism at the time. Tom Wolfe was a well-known journalist in the 1960s and 70s. He migrated around the country and wrote essays on the social changes that were going on during the 60s, many of which were published in Esquire, New York Magazine and Harper’s Weekly. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, along with many of his other works, was written in a different style that was relatively new for the time, a style that became “new journalism”. The story goes that, during the newspaper strike in New York in 1962, Wolf wrote a letter to his editor that expressed his ideas on how he wanted to write an article that was to be published in Esquire magazine. His editor …show more content…
While they continued to do their research on the topics, they focused on the characters, scenes and plotlines, adding dialogue to make it more real. Many of their works were published in magazines and newspapers, but some of the authors published pieces as “nonfiction novels”. Along with Test, Tome Wolfe published a compilation of other new journalism pieces written by well-known authors who practiced it, including Truman Capote, Gay Talese and Hunter S. Thompson. Topics addressed by these journalists were mostly what was going on at the time, like the counterculture movement and Vietnam. The impact new journalism had on the profession is as influential as the events the pieces were written