From the introduction to a new edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which was published last month by Picador.

More than half a century after Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was first published, it has become a story of meetings, tangled bequests, and legacies. Allen Ginsberg put it succinctly in The Village Voice:

Neal Cassady drove Jack Kerouac to Mexico in a prophetic automobile to see the physical body of America, the same Denver Cassady that one decade later drove Ken Kesey’s Kosmos-patterned school bus on a Kafka-circus tour over the roads of the awakening nation.

This struck Wolfe as “a marvelous fact”—and it was, it is.

The unrestrained energy and overloaded abandon of Wolfe’s prose is inconceivable without the immediate precedent of Kerouac. So everyone involved—both the participants and the writer chronicling its unfolding—has some kind of skin in the game. Wolfe sets it up beautifully:

Here was Kerouac and here was Kesey and here was Cassady in between them, once the mercury for Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation and now the mercury for Kesey and the whole—what?—something wilder and weirder out on the road.

Kerouac hadn’t just used Cassady in On the Road; in the long wait for its publication and, more damagingly, in its aftermath, he’d used and boozed himself up, too. If there was a hope that Kerouac might pass on some kind of blazing baton to Kesey, it came to nothing because by then the baton had become a bottle (of ashes, somehow) that Kesey was no longer interested in receiving. While the bus’s famous destination plate read furthur, Kerouac had taken a pledge to stay put, brooding over a success so huge it had assumed a quality of doom. After a final meeting in New York City, Kerouac and Cassady would never see each other again.

Crucially, both Kesey and Cassady, even when decked out like a pair of Day-Glo weirdos, also appeared to have one foot in this outside world. More exactly, they had shoulders the straight world could respect. Kesey’s idea of breaking barriers was to ignore them: the barriers between keeping LSD a serious aid to mind expansion and promoting it as a delirious conduit for mass recreation, between spiritual revolution and hedonistic silliness, between activism and solipsism. By the late Sixties, the wild and boundary-free craziness of the Acid Tests had become chaotically and corrosively entwined with radical politics. It was no surprise, by the time a brittle Joan Didion took a look around San Francisco, that she viewed with skepticism the less-than-great notion that a five-year-old girl taking acid might be a leap forward in the project of human enlightenment.

Kesey is the star of his own show, but the reader keeps being drawn back to Cassady. He is like the guy who picks up an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor without whom the movie would have flopped. Muscular like Kesey and no less committed to prankster silliness, he remains strangely resistant to Wolfe’s rapt scrutiny. Those heroically pointless, amphetamine-fueled feats of driving were achievements of a sort, but they took a fearsome toll. Wolfe was struck by the way that “there are two Cassadys. One minute Cassady looks 58 and crazy—speed!—and the next, 28 and peaceful—acid.” Robert Stone extends the actuarial range still further, noting that, by the time they got to New York in 1964, Cassady “looked about seventy years old”—an age he never got close to attaining.

Cassady is both tragic hero—tragic supporting hero—and fool. Kesey became a fugitive, fleeing from—and then returning to—the swirl of a heady revolution he’d helped foment. He advocated going “beyond acid,” whatever that meant, but the net effect of his efforts was a massive shot in the arm for recreational drugs generally. A lot of psychedelic evangelists end up just getting high on whatever drugs come to hand, but amphetamine is a drug with no serious claims to mind expansion, and speed was arguably Cassady’s drug of choice. He died aged just forty-one, a character in other people’s books, alone in Mexico.