A note on dates
Several of the books most closely tied to 1967 were not published in 1967. Joan Didion’s collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem appeared in 1968, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test appeared that same year, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five came out in 1969. The year 1967 was when many of these writers were most visible, and the written record of the counterculture mostly followed a little later.
Ken Kesey and the Pranksters
Ken Kesey was already an established novelist before he became a countercultural figure. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest appeared in 1962 and Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964. He had taken part in government-linked drug trials in the Bay Area earlier in the decade, which introduced him to LSD.
In 1964 he and a group of friends, later called the Merry Pranksters, travelled across the United States in a painted school bus. The trip was filmed and recorded, and the group’s improvised, collective way of working was an experiment in storytelling as much as in lifestyle. In 1965 and 1966 the Pranksters hosted the Acid Tests in California, mixing music, lights and LSD, and the Grateful Dead, then still a young band, played at several.
Kesey faced marijuana charges in 1965 and fled to Mexico for a time before returning. He reportedly served a short jail sentence in 1967. He wrote less fiction in the later 1960s than many expected, but his influence came from his example, and from Wolfe’s account of the Pranksters, which belongs to the New Journalism rather than to Kesey’s own bibliography.
Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan, a poet and novelist living in San Francisco, had a very good year in 1967. His short novel Trout Fishing in America, written several years earlier, was published that year and became a favourite on campuses. It is a loose, humorous, often surreal book in which the phrase of its title shifts meaning from page to page.
Brautigan also had links with the Diggers, who printed his work as free handouts that year. His poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” circulated in this form. In Watermelon Sugar followed in 1968. Critics have debated whether he was a countercultural writer or simply an unusual one; his own attitude to the label was ambivalent.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was older than the hippies, born in 1922, and had served in the Second World War, where he survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. Even so, many young readers found him in the 1960s. Cat’s Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) mixed science fiction, satire and plain-spoken moral concern, and they offered a view of authority as absurd and dangerous that suited the period.
His breakthrough came with Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, once the Vietnam War had made his antiwar themes more widely relevant. In 1967 he was a respected cult author rather than a bestseller, and his popularity on campuses is one reason he is often placed alongside the counterculture’s writers.
Joan Didion in the Haight
Joan Didion went to San Francisco in 1967 to report on the Haight-Ashbury scene. The result was the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, published in the Saturday Evening Post that September and then as the title piece of her 1968 collection. It is a cold, observant portrait of young people adrift, including children left in the care of other drifting adults.
Didion did not romanticise the Summer of Love. She wrote about confusion and neglect, which put her at odds with the cheerful coverage in many magazines. Her work belongs to the wider tradition of the New Journalism writers, but it also makes a good counterpoint to the more enthusiastic accounts of the time.
Beat roots and the print scene
None of this started in 1967. The earlier Beat writers, particularly Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, had shown that unconventional writing could find a large audience. Small presses and bookshops, notably City Lights in San Francisco, kept that tradition alive. Meanwhile the underground press supplied a cheap, fast outlet for poems, comics and essays that mainstream publishers would not touch.
What the literature shared
These writers did not form a single school. Kesey and the Pranksters treated life itself as the material for art, Brautigan worked in short, playful fragments, Vonnegut used science fiction to criticise war, and Didion used reporting to doubt the whole mood of the moment. What they had in common was a distrust of established forms and authorities.
The books that lasted tend to be those whose authors kept some distance from the scene they described, which is a useful point when judging how reliable any single account of 1967 is.