Today we celebrate the 1931 birthday of author Tom Wolfe who became a hero of the counterculture with the 1968 publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — an experimental report on the drug culture surrounding Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe is a New Journalism pioneer whose use of fictional devices in his non-fiction reporting represented a literary breakthrough that found Wolfe aligned with lions like Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Terry Southern and Norman Mailer.

Here’s The Word According to Tom Wolfe…

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I’ve spent a lot of time in the music scene and in the art world, but in my experience there is nothing like a literary crowd for jealousy, resentment, backbiting and general bad sportsmanship. With this in mind it may come as no surprise that there was no love lost between William S. Burroughs and Truman Capote. Capote was generally a target for jealous bashing by all of the Beats, but Burroughs’ resentment of the man and his work may have transcended everyday annoyance, reaching supernatural scale. Did WSB curse Truman Capote? Thom Robinson at Reality Studio think so. Here’s an excerpt from his fascinating article citing Burroughs’ “Open Letter to Truman Capote” which can be found in the Burroughs Archive

Avowing that Capote’s early short stories were “in some respects promising,” Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.”

It should be noted that, at the time of writing, Burroughs was a credulous believer in the efficacy of curses (famously believing he had successfully used tape recorders to close down a London restaurant where he had received bad service). Regardless of how seriously Burroughs intended his prediction for Capote’s future, his words proved eerily prescient. After the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote announced work on an epic novel entitled Answered Prayers, intended as a Proustian summation of the high society world to which he had enjoyed privileged access over the previous decades. The slim existing contents were eventually published posthumously while one of the few extracts which saw publication within Capote’s lifetime notoriously employed Capote’s habit of indiscretion to disastrous effect. When “La Côte Basque, 1965″ was published by Esquire in 1975, Capote’s betrayal of the confidences of friends (who recognized the identities lurking beneath the veneer of fictionalized characters) resulted in swift exile from the celebrity world which Capote had courted for much of his career.

Word virus, indeed.

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