Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

His health continued to decline, and in 2005, he died by suicide at age 67. The film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas boosted his celebrity in 1998, but by then his writing had lost its trademark vitality.

His vices were already gaining on him, and for the next three decades, he traded on his Gonzo persona by turning out books of diminishing importance. After Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, Thompson converted his “jangled campaign diary” into Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, another successful book that was later described as a classic of American political journalism.Īs the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon’s presidency, Gonzo thrived at Rolling Stone, but Thompson wrote more sparingly for the magazine after that. Blending keen insights with invective, satire, and wild hallucinations, Thompson’s coverage was called the least factual and most accurate description of the campaign. What Thompson later called “a nonfiction novel” became a bestselling book for Random House that crystallized Gonzo journalism in the public imagination.įresh off that triumph, Thompson covered the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone. Those two weekends became the basis for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which Rolling Stone ran in November 1971. One editor suggested that Thompson and Acosta return to Las Vegas to cover a drug enforcement conference. Thompson recounted that adventure in a piece he sent to Rolling Stone, the upstart rock magazine cofounded by Jann Wenner. The following year, Thompson spent a riotous weekend in Las Vegas with Chicano attorney Oscar Acosta. “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” was heralded as a journalistic breakthrough, and Thompson’s friend at the Boston Globe, Bill Cardoso, first applied the term Gonzo to it. In 1970, Thompson queried Warren Hinckle at Scanlan’s Monthly: would he be interested in a piece about the Kentucky Derby? Hinckle paired Thompson with Ralph Steadman, whose grotesque illustrations complemented Thompson’s scathing portrait of Louisville society. Now, five decades after Rolling Stone published “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Gonzo journalism is due for a fresh review. Thompson’s work, signature style, and the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the 20th century. By that time, however, Gonzo was shorthand for Hunter S. It began as an accident, peaked with several works of startling power and originality, and eventually consumed its creator. Gonzo journalism was an attitude, an experiment, and a withering critique of hypocrisy and mendacity.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson