Wednesday, May 16, 2018
I'd love to read about Tom Wolfe's time with the Merry Pranksters- or about his reportorial methods generally. Bonfire of the Vanities is about my Bronx, or at least the Bronx I moved in back then, and its verisimilitude gives everything else I've read by him serious credibility. That said, he was a curmudgeonly critic, and an oddly conservative cat. The Painted Word is about as wrongheaded as anything this side of Mailer's Prisoner of Sex. Still and all, if I were teaching a course on the Sixties The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hunter Thompson's Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Mailer's Armies of the Night, and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time would be on the syllabus, along with Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique.
// posted by Bill @ 5:57 PM 
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