Literary Quote of the Day: Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe (b. 1931) is one of the best writers in American journalism and literature.
Known for his trademark white suit, Wolfe is the father of New Journalism, in which the tradition of dispassionate and balanced reporting was discarded for freer narrative writing.
The most oustanding example of this is Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968), an account of the adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters that used onomatopoeia, free association and funky punctuation to capture the manic personalities of Kesey and his gang as they drive cross country in a DayGlo painted school bus named Furthur doing lots of psychedelic drugs and having lots of revelations.
An excerpt:
That’s good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Cool Breeze is a kid with three or four days’ beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit up on them, the San Francisco symbol of “bar”–thousands of neon-magenta martini glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we’re in, their white faces erupting from their lapels like marshmallows–streaming and bouncing down the hill–and God knows they’ve got plenty to look at.
I once asked Kesey, who was a terrific writer in his own right, how accurate he found Wolfe’s book to be. His response, as best I can remember through the haze of marijuana smoke at the party we were attending, was that while Wolfe did not take a single note the entire time he was with the Pranksters, he got it right down to the smallest detail and the longest quote.
Kesey was in awe. You will be too.
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2 Responses to “Literary Quote of the Day: Tom Wolfe”
We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, “What’s in the bag, Hunter?”
“I’ve got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds,” said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. “No, never mind,” I said. “I believe you! Show me later!” From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn’t clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water.
Tom Wolfe, ‘As Gonzo in Life as in His Work’, WSJ 02.22.2005
Gray:
Wonderful!
I crossed paths with Thompson, once in Aspen and once in the Florida Keys, and he was every bit the demonic genius that Wolfe and others portrayed him to be.
He also was terrified of the water. Not a problem in Colorado but definitely one in the Keys, and it was all I could do to resist pushing him in.