The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 1968
Wolfe embedded with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and documented the psychedelic counterculture with such manic precision that the book itself seems to have taken LSD. The defining document of the 1960s counterculture and a masterwork of New Journalism.
The case against
Wolfe's style performs the acid so hard it never sobers up: ellipses, exclamation points, hundreds of pages at a single manic pitch. He reconstructs scenes he never witnessed, takes Kesey at roughly Kesey's own valuation, and glides past the casualties at the edge of the bus, the breakdowns, the discarded women. Exhilarating for fifty pages; after that it is the same trip retold.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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