[2] The Pump House Gang was published on the same day in 1968 as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe's story about the LSD-fueled adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Wolfe originally planned for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to be an essay to include in The Pump-House Gang but as the piece kept getting longer, it was published as a standalone book instead.

The essays collectively tell the story of the new status symbols and lifestyles of the 1960s and how the culture was changing from the traditional social hierarchies of the time.

[10] The pieces in The Pump House Gang are written in the style of New Journalism that Wolfe and other writers like Joan Didion and Gay Talese helped to popularize.

His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names and anatomical terms.