The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Description

The first of Tom Wolfe's genre-defining non-fiction books, reissued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia - as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? - Wolfe's flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation's 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

You only had to look at him... or read such books as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff to know that Tom Wolfe was like no other -- John Pye * The Scotsman * Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence -- Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph * Effortlessly, elegantly, Tom Wolfe bestrode both fiction and non-fiction... a style at once objective, subjective, and hallucinatory -- Andy Martin * Independent * [Tom Wolfe's] gleeful use of punctuation and italics, along with entertaining asides and neologisms that often quickly cemented themselves into the English lexicon, helped Wolfe stand out from other journalists * Guardian * [Wolfe] made literature fun and bores don't like fun -- Freddy Gray * The Catholic Herald *