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Once upon a time, there was a band of tricksters called the . Ken Kesey was their Chief. He bought a bus and he and his band loaded it with recording equipment and movie cameras and went for . They were cartoon character heroes, but they were also a tribal community. Neal Cassady was with them. He was the man whom Jack Kerouac called “the greater driver,�� because of the time he and Jack spent on the road, which Jack later wrote about in a big book about hitchhiking, but now Cassady was driving the bus, which was named .�� And the Pranksters drove to New York City to see Jack. But Jack and Kesey didn’t have much they wanted to talk about. And they drove to Millbrook to see Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. But it was too staid. And they hung out with the Hell’s Angels. And sometimes it got tense. And they went to San Francisco to see the . But it was a bad trip. And the played rock music. And Allen Ginsberg rang bells and played finger cymbals. And there were strobe lights and neon signs.

Tom Wolfe wrote about the Pranksters and their Chief. He wrote about the chemical they took, which was called LSD. He wrote about what it did to their minds, and sometimes he used a stream of consciousness style that made you feel like you were there. He wrote about the kinds of books the Pranksters liked. Books by writers like Aldous Huxley, Herman Hesse, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote about the Pranksters�� ideas, like that they saw themselves as characters in a movie, and about their parties, which they called “Acid Tests.�� Sometimes you felt that he did not agree with them, but that was okay, because you could see that he had made a genuine effort to understand them.

Acquired perhaps in Fall 1978
H.H.S. Hartland, New Brunswick