Synopses & Reviews
Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, Hunter S. Thompson is back with another astonishing volume of his private correspondence, the highly anticipated follow-up to
The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997,
Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining";
Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and
The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction."
Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years -- addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut -- is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.
Provocative and revealing, Fear and Loathing in America cements Hunter S. Thompson's reputation as one of the great literary and cultural icons of our time -- the only man alive to have ridden with both the Hell's Angels and Richard Nixon.
Review
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Hunter Thompson is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists. His ideas are brilliant and honorable and valuable...the literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken.
Review
Nelson Algren
His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest.
Review
Garry Wills
He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.
Review
Tom Wolfe
There are only two adjectives writers care about anymore..."brilliant" and "outrageous"...and Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them.
About the Author
Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include
Hell’s Angels,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72,
The Rum Diary, and
Better than Sex. He died in
2005.
David Halberstam was one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians, a man whose newspaper reporting and books have helped define the era we live in. He graduated from Harvard in 1955, took his first job on the smallest daily in Mississippi, and then covered the early civil rights struggle for the Nashville Tennessean. He joined The New York Times in 1960, went overseas almost immediately, first to the Congo and then to Vietnam. His early pessimistic dispatches from Vietnam won him the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of thirty. His last twelve books, starting with The Best and the Brightest and including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, and The Fifties, have all been national bestsellers. Thirty-eight years after Mr. Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, War in a Time of Peace was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in April 2007.