An LSD experience without the LSD" -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice.

Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed the example of his professor Marshall Fishwick by enrolling in Yale University's American Studies doctoral program. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair which described the society of 19th century England. The Post's city editor was "amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill the beat every reporter wanted.

Beginning his career as a reporter he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the sixties after the publication of books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and his collections of articles and essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe Jr. His first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities released in 1987 was met with critical acclaim and was a great commercial success.