The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby - Writing Style

Writing Style

As the title of the book indicates, Wolfe liberally uses colorful language. In addition, he makes frequent use of onomatopoeia, and uses all manner of type: capitalization, italics, multiple exclamation points, dashes, etc. Another characteristic of Wolfe's writing is switching from highly technical or scientific explanations to very colloquial turns of phrase, often within a single sentence. And, just as Wolfe uses medical jargon when describing the body, he uses commercial language when describing products and slang and vulgarity when chronicling sub-cultures.

Most of these techniques remain hallmarks of Wolfe's writing style throughout his career, including in his publications following The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby: The Pump House Gang, another collection of essays, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe's chronicle of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Read more about this topic:  The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or style:

    Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
    Thomas Mann (18751955)

    Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)