Apocalypse has come and gone, and what will the psychedelic writers do now—Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson? Did they flame out, like their decade? Their long roller-coaster sentences, whose art was to seem half out of control, caught the veerings of the '60s. It was a breathless time, no one could keep up—take notes as you run, and stop every now and then to exclaim something like, "Just so!"

Mailer got there first…. Thompson came last and most extravagant, using Hawkeye Pierce's technique of homeopathic madness to outlast the time by outcrazying it. Did they capture the time so well that they were captured by it, and have nowhere to go? That may not be true of the other two; but things look bleak at the moment for "Doctor" Thompson….

Hunter Thompson, who created so many alternate personae in his own work...