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A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream - Hunter S Thompson

‘Fear and Loathing’ is an account of its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and is based upon Hunter S. Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta’s trip to Las Vegas around the same time period.

Thompson had been writing an expose for Rolling Stone on the 1970 killing of the Mexican-American television journalist Ruben Salazar, who had been shot in the head at close range with a tear gas canister fired by officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. One of Thompson’s sources for the story was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Mexican-American activist and attorney. Thompson told Acosta Sports Illustrated magazine had offered him a job writing photo captions for the Mint 400 motocross race held annually in Las Vegas. Finding it difficult for a Hispanic to talk openly to a white reporter in L.A.’s tense atmosphere, Thompson and Acosta decided that Las Vegas would be a more comfortable place to discuss the story.

Thompson later wrote that he wrapped up the Vegas trip by spending about 36 hours alone in a Las Vegas hotel room “feverishly writing in my notebook” about his experiences. Those notes were the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Thompson then started the Fear and Loathing manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California during his spare time while he finished the Salazar story for Rolling Stone (which was published as Strange Rumblings in Aztlan on April 29, 1971).What was intended as a 250-word photo-captioning job/road trip snowballed into a novel-length feature for Rolling Stone magazine. Thompson later wrote that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner “[liked] the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it.” He had first submitted a 2,500 word manuscript to Sports Illustrated, which was, as he later wrote, “aggressively rejected.”

The text was eventually published as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Rolling Stone as a two-part series in November 1971. The article was printed with illustrations by British illustrator, Ralph Steadman. Steadman and Thompson first began working together in 1970 on Thompson’s article, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” for the short-lived magazine, Scanlan’s Monthly.[4] The novelization of “Fear and Loathing” (with additional Ralph Steadman illustrations) was quickly published by Random House the next year and was heralded as “by far the best book yet on the decade of dope” by the New York Times[5] and a “scorching epochal sensation” by author Tom Wolfe.

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