The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - 1968

VERY GOOD condition — DUST JACKET: Minor wear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. Small chip to top outside corner, back panel. Very small chip to laminate face, bottom of spine. Glue ghosts to spine and outside corners, reverse. BOARDS: Very minor soiling, front and back. Very small bump to top edge and bottom outside corner, front. BOOK: Minor foxing/soiling to textblock page edges, extending slightly to page margins on foredge. GLUE RESIDUE TO TOP AND BOTTOM OF FRONT AND REAR PASTE-DOWNS. SEVERAL PAGES IN LATTER PART OF BOOK WITH SMUDGES ON OUTER AND BOTTOM MARGINS. CRACKED HINGE AT "AUTHOR'S NOTE" PAGE, BACK OF BOOK. Please inspect photos closely for condition details. More pics available on request.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Tom Wolfe's counterculture classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early and enduringly popular example of the New Journalism literary style. It is a true 1st edition, 1st printing of the work published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1968. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

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"One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism.

This is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day.

'An American classic' (Newsweek) that defined a generation. 'An astonishing book' (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the psychedelic 1960s."

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Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018) was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Much of Wolfe's work was satirical and centred on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class, social status, and the lifestyles of the economic and intellectual elites of New York City.

Wolfe began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (an account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In 1979, he published the influential book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which was made into a 1983 film of the same name directed by Philip Kaufman.

His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and also became a commercial success. . . . His defining work . . . is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (published the same day as The Pump House Gang in 1968), which for many epitomized the 1960s. Although a conservative in many ways (in 2008, he claimed never to have used LSD and to have tried marijuana only once), Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.

The above text taken from, respectively, Pan Macmillan publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.