I don't know if there are many of these. I certainly haven't run into a lot of them but there is one that I think is at least a candidate and, as far as I know, it wasn't written by a baby boomer but by someone of an earlier generation.

And it's really a novel about what happens when a few folks from that Sixties drug culture encounter the ancient and vastly more complex than they can even begin to comprehend culture of India.

It's called Gates of Fire and it's by Elwyn M. Chamberlain. It came out around about 1978 from, I think, Grove Press, was reprinted in paperback by Bantam and was also revived some years later by, I believe, North Atlantic Press. I just checked Amazon.com and they list it as out of print but with copies on offer from dealers.

Worth a hunt for anyone seriously interested in the topic.

John R. Douglas

A few of the more obvious, but necessary examples I can think of are Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" and Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" although the later is more of an early 1970's novel, it's still a classic.

I'd also recommend one by Baba Ram Dass, called Be Here Now It's actually two books in one. For the most part it's a sort of journey through his philosophical and spiritual outlooks on life, beautifully illustrated with flowing text pictures etc. Then nestled into the middle is the story of how Dr. Richard Alpert met Timother Leary, tuned in, dropped out, went to India, met his spiritual guru, and became Baba Ram Dass. Great story, great things to learn. If you go to the Amazon link above you can check out about 26 pages of it online. I believer there's somewhere else that has the whole thing available. Let me look...
Here we go...Not an actual visual representation of the book, but it looks like the full text of it is there, minus the story of how Alpert became Ram Das.
Search it out if it looks interesting. It's definitely worth the search.

If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

William S. Burrough's

Junky, scary shit...

--
Tim

Burroughs precedes sixties drug culture, I do buh-leeve. I don't have my copy of naked lunch at work here, and I've never given much thought to when books are produced. The only one of his books I couldn't finish was The Soft Machine. I put it down after reading the words 'anal mucus' for the eighteenth time on the third page and said 'maybe later.' I'm sure I'll go back and read it someday.

It's not a novel, but "Storming Heaven" by Jay Stevens is vital to any understanding of the '60s drug culture. And a cracking read.

The book that I think of when I think of 60s drug culture is Go Ask Alice. Don't get me wrong, I'm as pro-drug use as most hippies, but the book put me in late-60s san francisco when I read it in college a decade ago. I've read and identified with most of those mentioned in this post, but Go Ask Alice was thrilling. It didn't end my drug taking career, it might have even fueled it.

dharma bums, by kerouac
there are few things that make me appreciate the vision that literature grants than that.

and yes, i AM the man in love with gary snyder.

-a cat wandering through wind to a warm room.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Shadoth:
Burroughs precedes sixties drug culture, I do buh-leeve. ...

---

true, but while not published IN the sixties (1953) it is certainly OF the sixties.

--
Tim

Dharma Bums is fantastic!!! I'm a huge Kerouac fan and that's my favorite of his. I would have never thought of it as a novel about 60's drug culture. More of a spiritual journey to me.

If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Igpajo:
Excerpted: A few examples "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", "Doors of Perception", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "Be Here Now".

All interesting choices but none of them novels. The Thompson comes closer than some of the others since it uses some fictional tools to narrate what would otherwise be a memoir but they all qualify as non-fiction, albeit about events that stray into the surreal and unusual.

Best,

JD

John R. Douglas

Okay, true. I was thinking books. You could probably say the same thing about Dharma Bums too since practically everything Kerouac wrote was just a fictionalized retelling of his own life events.
But Oh well.

If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

Sorta sideways, but Mark Vonnegut's "Eden Express"

http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/eden.html

I'm surprised no one's mentioned A Scanner Darkly - granted, it's not explicitly set in the 60s, but in every respect is informed by that time and by Dick's weirdly tangential involvement in the drug culture.

Or, on that same basis of influenced-by, Delany's Dhalgren would certainly qualify. So too the acid-like trip that fills one chapter of Equinox, which, with its hallucinatorily-intense prose, ranks among Delany's greatest fictional sequences, however distasteful much of the rest of that novel may be.

Also, Bruce Boston's novel Stained-Glass Rain, which I haven't read but am curious about. Anyone out there know it?

The best description of a 60s-era acid trip I've ever read was in Joel Agee's memoir, "A Fury of Symbols", published in Harper's Magazine in February 1989. Well worth looking up. The last I heard, Agee had incorporated it into a book-length memoir, but was having trouble finding a publisher. This is a shame, as he's one of the finest relatively unknown writers I've come across.

Ron Drummond

http://www.oz.net/~jhawk/wtc/gardensteps/

[This message was edited by Ron Drummond on January 25, 2003 at 05:43 PM.]

Back in the sixties we read "Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me" by Richard Farina and "The Fan Man" by William Kotzwinkle - both druggy 60s classics though probably hard to get these days.

Maybe Stone's Dog Soldiers?