Drug Themes in Fiction/Annotated Bibliography-The Disillusionment of the 1970's
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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE 1970's
Works (not listed in original)
- Go Ask Alice
- Kentucky Ham
- Acapulco Gold
- Play It as It Lays
- Dealing or the Berkeley-to-Boston-Forty-Brick-Lost-Bag Blues
- Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
- North Dallas Forty
- Divine Right's Trip: A Folk Tale
- The Season of the Witch
- Dress Her in Indigo
- The Gateway
- The Drifters
- The Possession of Joel Delaney
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Shaft
| Author: | Anonymous |
| Title: | Go Ask Alice |
| Publisher: | Avon Books, New York |
| Pages: | 187 pp. |
| Date: | 1973 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:Based on the diary of a 15-year-old drug user, this novel chronicles her bizarre drug encounters and her struggle to escape the pull of the drug culture which feeds both her need for drugs and her anxieties. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Burroughs, William, Jr. |
| Title: | Kentucky Ham |
| Publisher: | Button, New York |
| Pages: | 194 pp. |
| Date: | 1973 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:A fictionalized autobiographical account of experiences with heroin, speed, paregoric, Desoxyn, and Dilaudid by the son of the author of Naked Lunch. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Corley, Edwin |
| Title: | Acapulco Gold |
| Publisher: | Dodd, Mead, New York |
| Pages: | 329 pp. |
| Date: | 1972 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Escapism |
| Annotation:Based on the hypothesis that the government is about to legalize marijuana, this novel follows the steps a major tobacco company and an advertising agency go through to prepare for the sale Of their new product: "Acapulco Gold". | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: positive. | |
| Author: | Didion, Joan |
| Title: | Play It as It Lays |
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York |
| Pages: | 214 pp. |
| Date: | 1970 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Escapism |
| Annotation:The actress heroine of this Hollywood novel struggles through a bizarre life on uppers and downers, eventually watching her best friend die of barbiturate overdose in her arms. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Douglas, Michael |
| Title: | Dealing or the Berkeley-to-Boston-Forty-Brick-Lost-Bag Blues |
| Publisher: | Knopf, New York |
| Pages: | 222 pp. |
| Date: | 1971 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Escapism |
| Annotation:A student at Harvard flies to Berkeley to score marijuana for a Boston dealer. This turns into a comic chase with a funny cast of collegiate characters getting caught in a narcotics raid with 40 bricks of marijuana. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: positive. | |
| Author: | Farina, Richard |
| Title: | Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me |
| Publisher: | Random House, New York |
| Pages: | 329 pp. |
| Date: | 1966 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Experiential mode |
| Annotation:The story of a student's picaresque travels across the United States and into Cuba, where marijuana and peyote experiences play a regular role in the life of the hip sub-cultures he visits. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: positive. | |
| Author: | Gent, Peter |
| Title: | North Dallas Forty |
| Publisher: | Morrow, New York |
| Pages: | 314 pp. |
| Date: | 1973 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Escapism |
| Annotation:The story of the last eight days in a professional football player's career details the use of drugs by the team as stimulating and pain-killing agents as well as drug use by the players for escape from the harsh life of physical punishment that they live. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Norman, Gurney |
| Title: | Divine Right's Trip: A Folk Tale |
| Publisher: | Dial Press, New York |
| Pages: | 302 pp. |
| Date: | 1972 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Hallucinogenic experience |
| Annotation:A latter-day Kerouac tale of a hash-inspired vision which sets off a hallucinogenic trip across the U.S.A. in a "day-glow" painted VW van which ends with a "return to the earth" on a Kentucky farm. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: positive. | |
| Author: | Herlihy, James Leo |
| Title: | The Season of the Witch |
| Publisher: | Simon and Schuster, New York |
| Pages: | 384 pp. |
| Date: | 1971 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Escapism; Social problems |
| Annotation:Told as the diary of a 17-year-old runaway searching for her father, this novel explores the use of drugs in the counterculture as escape from painful realities and social surroundings found untenable. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | MacDonald, John |
| Title: | Dress Her in Indigo |
| Publisher: | Lippincott, New York |
| Pages: | 255 pp. |
| Date: | 1971 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:Travis McGee, "salvage artist", follows a dead girl's tracks to the drug freak scene in Mexico, where she spent the last months of her life. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | McCune, Ned |
| Title: | The Gateway |
| Publisher: | Dell Publishing Company, New York |
| Pages: | 203 pp. |
| Date: | 1973 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:A novel about a banker who goes on a methedrine bender on the weekend and slips over the edge of reality into paranoid hallucinations which end up in a violent finish in which he dies. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Michener, James |
| Title: | The Drifters |
| Publisher: | Random House, New York |
| Pages: | 751 pp. |
| Date: | 1971 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:A 60-year-old financier follows six young people around the world; one of them is Monica, the drug-addict daughter of a British ex-colonel. A survey of the youth scene, including, inevitably, drugs. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Steward, Ramona |
| Title: | The Possession of Joel Delaney |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown, Boston, Massachusetts |
| Pages: | 279 pp. |
| Date: | 1970 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Hallucinogenic experience |
| Annotation:The witchcraft possession of Joel Delaney by a spirit, Tonio, after an LSD experience, criss-crosses social and drug themes in a story of psychological complexity. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |
| Author: | Thompson, Hunter |
| Title: | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas |
| Publisher: | Random House, New York |
| Pages: | 231 pp. |
| Date: | 1971 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Reality |
| Annotation:This fictionalized story of a journalist's trip to Las Vegas on a variety of uppers, downers, and hallucinogenics provides a distortion screen on which the bizarre world of gamblers and tourists is projected with impressively vivid literary technique. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: neutral. | |
| Author: | Tidyman, Ernest |
| Title: | Shaft |
| Publisher: | Macmillan, New York |
| Pages: | 188 pp. |
| Date: | 1970 |
| Format: | Novel |
| Descriptor: | Social problems |
| Annotation:A black superhero private detective grapples with heroin traffic, black militants, the Mafia, and the evils of a white world in general. | |
| Viewpoint towards drugs: negative. | |