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The Ultimate Trip: "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" Heads to the Big Screen Film version of Tom Wolfe's book on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters comes closer to reality The onscreen version of Tom Wolfe's literary cult hit The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is primed to hit theaters by 2010. When published in 1968, the book shattered cultural perceptions of the peaceful, passive hippie zeitgeist by introducing the Merry Pranksters, author Ken Kesey's roving gonzo army of LSD-fueled pioneers who tripped about the country, mixing it up with rowdy Oregonians, Bay Area hippies, Hollywood rockers, Hell's Angels and a flurry of left-handed...

For more than 40 years, author Tom Wolfe has challenged the way Americans look at themselves. His unconventional style of mixing literary techniques with factual reporting became known as the "new journalism." His novels include the bestsellers "Bonfire of The Vanities," "A Man in Full," and "I Am Charlotte Simmons." TCS contributor Ben Wattenberg sat down with Tom Wolfe in New York following a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Derriere Garde, a loosely organized group of artists and composers working to rediscover and reinvent traditional forms and techniques. The full video of this interview can...

The wit of Oscar Wilde is often more clever than insightful, but when he declared that “one’s first duty in life is to assume a pose”, he may have been on to something: clothes don’t just make the man; they can, if unchanging in style and sufficiently de trop, make him look ageless. This, at least, is the impression left by Tom Wolfe as he blazes through the culinary empyrean of Café Boulud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trailing dash and élan among the stolidly well-heeled and sourly superannuated diners. The writer who pioneered reporting with the intensity of literature,...

In his brilliant essay "The Great Relearning," Tom Wolfe recounts a "curious footnote to the hippie movement." In 1968, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, doctors found themselves treating diseases "no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names." These maladies had such names as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the rot. These afflictions materialized because those hippie pilgrims believed the Man had nothing to teach them, so they turned their backs on "bourgeois" morality, a category of knowledge that included this thing...

Geopolitics: Radical chic is thriving in the whirl of parties at the United Nations these days, and no one is being courted more solicitously as one of the downtrodden than Evo Morales of Bolivia. You remember "radical chic," don't you? The 1960s and 1970s phenomenon, described by Tom Wolfe in his "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers" tells how New York's glitterati threw black-tie parties to court supposedly "real" revolutionaries — like Black Panthers, Puerto Rican separatists or Indian liberationists — in a bid to feel "authentic." It's been a long time, but radical chic isn't dead. Which explains why...

Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast. I take that term, the human beast, from my idol, Emile Zola, who published a novel entitled The Human Beast in 1888, just 29 years after Darwin's The Origin of Species broke the stunning news that Homo sapiens--or Homo loquax, as I call him--was not created by God in his own image but was precisely that, a beast, not different in any essential way from snakes...

by Mark Finkelstein May 11, 2006 You'd think that any reasonable person would be pleased that we are not suffering the kind of turbulent times on American campuses experienced during the '60s and early '70s. Campus buildings sacked and put to the torch, student union buildings occupied by armed militants, academic careers and lives disrupted, and the ultimate tragedy of four young people killed at Kent State. Could it be that Chris Matthews isn't reasonable? For on this evening's Hardball, he expressed nostalgia for that riotous past coupled with apparent frustration that today's campuses are not aflame. His guest was...

Novelist Tom Wolfe, who wrote about the lacrosse culture in his book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, reiterated yesterday that the book is not set in Durham. Wolfe, who spoke at the N.C. Festival of the Book at Duke University on What's Southern Today, was asked to comment on the lacrosse case at Duke. A black woman hired to dance at a Duke la-crosse-team party in March has said that three white men raped her in the bathroom. Two players have been charged in the case. Wolfe said that he wrote a book that included similar characters, including "sexually aggressive lacrosse...

Status Reporter Tom Wolfe's advice: Escape the "parenthesis states" and explore America. BY JOSEPH RAGO Saturday, March 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. NEW YORK--Tom Wolfe turned out the manuscript of his last novel on a manual typewriter and "quite a bit of it by hand," he adds, "only because I had badly injured a finger and couldn't do the typing." It will probably be one of the last major books--if not the last--to be so composed, since Mr. Wolfe too has made concessions to high technology. "I'm now using a computer," he says, "because keeping a typewriter is pretty hard. It...

Tom Wolfe turned out the manuscript of his last novel on a manual typewriter and "quite a bit of it by hand," he adds, "only because I had badly injured a finger and couldn't do the typing." It will probably be one of the last major books--if not the last--to be so composed, since Mr. Wolfe too has made concessions to high technology. "I'm now using a computer," he says, "because keeping a typewriter is pretty hard. It really is like owning a buggy. You have to have all these parts made, or else cannibalized from somewhere, and you have...

One book that President Bush has apparently been recommending to fellow readers is Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", an R-rated behind-the-scenes look at just how wild today's universities have become. Wolfe details how sex is frequently reduced to heartless hookups and binge drinking, which leads to many risky, almost-anonymous sexual encounters. CBN News checked in with students at several top campuses to see if Wolfe got it right. Wolfe is known for doing exhaustive research, and for "I Am Charlotte Simmons" he spent many months interviewing students and hanging out on campuses, absorbing the atmosphere. Students that CBN News...

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" – Robert Browning, A Toccata of Galuppi's. In this hour of "bests," some will tell you the last restaurant they went to is the absolute best — the ribs or the Caesar salad, the filet or the yummy breads or the obscene desserts with more goop than anywhere else. For others, it's their golf clubs or their car. For still others it's the last book they read — such as, in this case, Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. The chichi critics have panned Charlotte for two...

Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised. The Addams-family eyebrows in Stephen King's book jacket photos combined with the heeby-jeeby horrors of his stories always made me think of Dracula. When I finally met Mr. King, he was in Miami playing, along with Amy Tan, in a jook-house band called the Remainders. He was Sunshine itself, a laugh and a half, the very picture of innocent fun, a Count Dracula who in real life was Peter Pan. Carl Hiaasen, the genius who has written such zany antic novels as "Striptease," "Sick Puppy," and "Skinny...

SURELY some bright bulb from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton has already remarked that President Bush's inaugural address 10 days ago is the fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. No? So many savants and not one peep out of the lot of them? Really?The president had barely warmed up: "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants ... and that is the force of human freedom.... The survival of liberty in...

TOM WOLFE IS AMERICA'S preeminent observer of decaying elites, chronicling and often forecasting their decline in his journalism and novels. In his 1970 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, he exposed the comic decadence of Leonard Bernstein and his friends, an elite so indifferent to its own survival it feted the Black Panthers at its Park Avenue mansions. In his 1975 book The Painted Word and the 1981 companion book From Bauhaus to Our House, he detailed the effete theories dooming America's art and architecture. He anticipated the decline of a privileged media class in his famous puncturing...

Tonight on Special Report with Brit Hume, it was announced that tomorrow night, New Year's Eve, there would be a special one hour interview by James Rosen, with author Tom Wolfe. A clip showed him talking about his support for Bush and his responses to the euromedia's horror at his support. The show will replace the Special Report program and will air at 6p EST and again later int he evening.

Tom Wolfe's Struggle With God and the Greeks A review of I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe By Ken Masugi This is an ugly book, but it could have been even uglier, being as it is a book about the life of the mind. And protagonist Charlotte Simmons of Sparta, North Carolina is scarcely an heroic figure. Prized by her protective family and a determined teacher, Charlotte becomes an outstanding student—admitted with full scholarship to Dupont University (a fictitious Ivy League school with a Georgetown or Duke-level basketball team). She is a freshman version of Sherman McCoy of...

I just wondered if anyone else here has read, or is reading, Tom Wolfe's new book, "I Am Charlotte Simmons"? Even though I teach at a U, it's quite an eye-opener (and yes, while it's fiction, I'm sure most of it is true in one form or another). In the same vein, has anyone read his previous book, "Hooking Up?" And is it in the same vein as this?

American author and journalist Tom Wolfe won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades on Monday -- the British prize for bad sex in fiction. The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel." Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest novel "I am Charlotte Simmons," a tale of campus life at an exclusive U.S. university. "Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins. "But the hand that was what she tried...

Three decades ago, writer Tom Wolfe captured the excesses of the 1960s in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." In the 1980s, he skewered the folly and emptiness of that decade in the great novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Now, in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," he does the same for the early twenty-first century. Wolfe’s novel covers some of the same ground as his previous book, "Hooking Up." As the title suggests, part of that book dealt with the sexual mores of young Americans. Wolfe famously noted that, in the “era of hooking up,” young people exchanged every possible body...