“He is irritating, but he did develop a new journalistic idiom that has brought relief from standard Middle-High Journalese.” “The question is not only whether Tom Wolfe can be taken seriously but whether he can be taken at all,” a Time magazine critic wrote in 1968. Written in a wild free-association style that disregarded rules of punctuation, it was filled with sentence fragments and used words like “skakkkkkkkkkkkkkk” and “wowwwwwww.” That led to a compilation of Wolfe’s magazine pieces, followed by “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which captured the spirit of the psychedelic era during his time with Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and his band of pranksters who helped spread the popularity of LSD in California. The magazine ran it verbatim as “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” In frustration, he sent his editor a letter with his thoughts and reportage. One of the genre’s defining moments came when Wolfe was having trouble meeting a deadline for a 1964 magazine story on the hot-rod car culture. He was present at the birth of what was known as “new journalism,” a loose style that featured lots of dialogue and detail and allowed reporters to narrate and develop characters in a way more often associated with fiction. Bush while receiving the National Humanities Medal in Washington, U.S., April 22, 2002. FILE PHOTO: Author Tom Wolfe stands with U.S.
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