“Further,” The Merry Pranksters’ bus.

Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was not the only literary masterpiece to come out of The Merry Pranksters’ Day-Glo bus. The other was “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” by New Journalist Extraordinaire Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe produced his original articles about Kesey and his crew for the Sunday magazine of the now-defunct “New York Herald Tribune.” (The newspaper is gone, but “New York Magazine” is still around.) It was published in three installments in January and February 1967, and then revised for book publication a few months later. Wolfe was never on the Pranksters’ bus, but, as Jack Shafer explains in an article about the book for The Columbia Journalism Review, he was able to reconstruct the experience by interviewing Kesey and the Pranksters; reading Kesey’s letters from Mexico to the novelist Larry McMurtry; watching 45 hours of film that the Pranksters shot; and listening to even more hours of audio that they recorded. And finally, Wolfe, dapper don in the white suit, took the acid test himself, and ingested 125 milligrams of LSD. The result? A book that has been in print for over 40 years, and gives Kesey’s classic a run for its money.

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