THE GREAT CONTEMPORANEOUS firsthand account of this 1960s, I think, is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s book about Kesey and his acid-dropping Merry Prankster adventures. Eight years later, in the mid-1970s, as the Big Bang of subjectivity and hedonism blasted its new elements and energies through the American universe, Wolfe memorialized the larger transformation. He wrote an essay in New York magazine that’s remembered today for coining a term, the Me Decade, still used as a catchphrase for the touchy-feely narcissism of the 1970s’ newfangled self-improvement schemes.
