Volume 11, Number 3 · August 22, 1968
Dr. Pop
By Margot Hentoff
The Pump House Gang
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pp., $5.95
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 432 pp., $5.95
Sometime during the early Sixties, trivia caught up with us all. Until then, informed awareness of the trifling or the grossly popular had been the mark of the young, hip anti-academics who, having been nurtured on comic books, soap operas, bad movies, and Orphan Annie code rings as well as the stuff of higher culture, grew up to insist that Captain Marvel and Charlie Parker were variations on The Hero with the Thousand Faces and, later, that Lenny Bruce was the most profound moral philosopher and Bob Dylan the best poet in America. After which serious people increasingly wrote seriously about popular art and style in both small and mass journals until, by the middle Sixties, we were well into a period of close analysis of junk.
Review, 1847 words
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