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.