How Tom Wolfe and Haight-Ashbury Made Each Other
This month marks the ninety-fifth birthday of one of the true unsung heroes of Haight-Ashbury – the late author Tom Wolfe.
In fact, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that Haight-Ashbury as we know it might not exist today if Wolfe had not been hanging around San Francisco in 1966, chronicling the antics of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Let’s take it one step further: Tom Wolfe may not have become such a literary sensation had he not stumbled into Haight-Ashbury in 1966 and written The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
The biography of Tom Wolfe (b. March 2, 1930) and the history of Haight-Ashbury intersect in an odd and marvelous way. In early 1966 neither had much celebrity. Wolfe at the time was a little-known, New York-based proponent of “new journalism”, which experimented with new literary devices in chronicling current events. He was especially interested in “saturation reporting”, in which reporters spend extended periods with their subjects, maybe moving in with them so the writer can witness everything possible about their subject.
In 1965, the 35-year-old scribe heard that Ken Kesey, the Oregonian who had written One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, was leading a group of hippies called the Merry Pranksters who were experimenting with LSD in Haight-Ashbury. Kesey had been arrested for marijuana possession in California, jumped bail, and fled to Mexico. Returning to the U.S., Kesey was sentenced to a few months in prison. By the time he got out in 1966, Wolfe was in San Francisco, ready to write about the author, the Pranksters, and their legendary tour across America in a wildly painted school bus called Furthur.
Wolfe had stumbled on the perfect subject for his pioneering form of journalism. Kesey was a renegade hero – brash, artistic, funny, courageous. He was surrounded by a magnificent cast of characters: Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road; Ken Babbs, who’d flown helicopters in Vietnam; a statuesque loudmouth called Mountain Girl; Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead; and the Hell’s Angels. They embodied the social trend – which had gripped the nation – of young people who were embracing LSD and the hippie lifestyle.
I can’t really say the book is set in Haight-Ashbury as much of it follows the bus tour, or takes place in Kesey’s base in La Honda, south of San Francisco. But the book brings to life the vibrant experimentation going on in the neighborhood east of Golden Gate Park from 1965 to 1967.
It was the perfect canvas for the young Tom Wolfe. The bizarre antics and mind-expanding drugs of his subjects gave Wolfe license to write with all the panache he could muster (which was quite a bit). It’s a wildly overwritten book, but that was perfectly in keeping with the bedlam he was describing. It feels like an acid trip. What’s more, the story of Ken Kesey and the uproar over the hippie lifestyle were grand enough to allow Wolfe to practice his “new journalism” on a single subject in book form for the first time.
Tom Wolfe was not the first to notice what was happening in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 and 1967. By the time The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was published in August 1968, it had been featured in LIFE magazine and NBC News. What he did do was document, preserve and publicize the folklore of Haight-Ashbury, capturing in vivid prose the wildness of the Summer of Love. The book sold around the world, even when the hippie thing became passé in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period, San Francisco’s tourism agency didn’t promote Haight-Ashbury as a sight worth seeing, but Tom Wolfe’s book did.
Certainly the legend of The Grateful Dead and other rock acts perpetuated the legacy of Haight-Ashbury. But Wolfe’s book, accessible anywhere and anytime, played a key role in elevating the neighborhood’s visibility and telling its story.
I first read the book between trips to San Francisco in 1980. After becoming enthralled with Haight-Ashbury on the first trip, I wanted to learn the story of the place before I returned. As I’ve written The Haight Mystery Series over the past few years, I’ve re-read it several times, always enjoying it, always learning more about the setting for my series of whodunnits.
The book is also essential in creating the legend of Tom Wolfe as an exemplar of new journalism. Above all else, it was a work of journalism, telling people what was happening NOW. Published a year before the Woodstock rock festival, swaths of readers were consuming the book as the hippie movement was at its flowery zenith. The other work of non-fiction that cemented Wolfe’s reputation was The Right Stuff, the story of the seven astronauts chosen for the Mercury space missions. It’s a wonderful book, but it was published in 1979, sixteen years after the Mercury Program ended.
When Wolfe turned his hand to fiction in 1987, he published the wildly successful Bonfire of the Vanities, which told the story of the hapless bond trader Sherman McCoy who was ruined after his car hit an African-American youth. The Dickensian satire of New York society was all the more effective because Wolfe was so skilled in chronicling social trends – a skill he had honed in writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Long before he was a legendary literary figure, clad in white and engaging in pissing matches with John Irving and Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe found the story of a lifetime on the other side of the continent from his home. He immersed himself in the story and was rewarded with the book that launched his career. And he lent literary credibility to Haight-Ashbury, because Wolfe’s deft touch showed that its story was big enough to justify attention.
I’m often astonished that Wolfe, who died in 2018, is not considered one of the grand characters of the Haight-Ashbury story. Jimi Hendrix barely passed through the place, but he is honored by the “Jimi Hendrix Red House”. That’s what Google calls it even though there’s no evidence the guitar god ever slept there. I get it. He was Jimi Hendrix, and should be celebrated. But Tom Wolfe was Tom Wolfe, and he merits more visibility in Haight-Ashbury.
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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.
