Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S. Thompson

Sometime after midnight on Wednesday I was standing in Grant Park about ten feet in front of the National Guard’s bayonet picket fence and talking to some Digger-types from Berkeley. It is the first time he uses the character Raoul Duke as his alter ego. The freewheeling rhetoric brings to mind what the novelist Tom Robbins once said of Thompson's work: “His prose style reads like he's careening down a mountain highway at 110 miles an hour, steering with his knees.”Ī few days after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago-in which he was harassed by police-Thompson wrote this “ wild flashback ” about the tumultous event. ” including the remarkable letter to his editor at Random House, Jim Silberman, in which he details his struggles with the writing of his masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. to get the story and to get things right. The selection that follows (including entries from a journal that he kept along with the letter-writing!) is focused particularly on what Brinkley refers to as Thompson's 'uncompromising perfectionism. In fact, Thompson considered titling the volumes “Confessions of a Mescaline Eater” or “ The Jimson Weed Chronicles,' in tribute to Thomas De Quincey or William S. ” Very much as Ernest Hemingway “warmed up ” by writing letters, Thompson has produced an astonishing amount over the years-some letters as long as thirty pages, many of an intensely personal nature regarding his wife, Sandy, and his son, Juan, many on financial matters, often with predictable bickereing with publishers, others on matters political, along with denunciations (Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman), feuds (Sidney Zion, Sally Quinn), and quite a few on experimentation and overindulgence in drugs. In his introduction to the second volume of Thompson’s letters (it covers the years 1968 to 1976) the editor, Douglas Brinkley, writes of Thompson as a “true pack rat, hell-bent on meticulously documenting every day of his life.

Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S. Thompson