Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by Hunter S. Thompson

The American Dream died in Las Vegas. Thompson was there.

For you if

you want the autopsy of the 1960s American Dream written from inside a drug-fueled descent through Las Vegas by the man who invented Gonzo journalism

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Thompson and his attorney drove to Las Vegas in 1971 with a trunk full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference, and came back with the most formally radical piece of American journalism ever written. The prose is unhinged, hallucinatory, and completely precise — the unreliable narrator is the argument, because Thompson understood that America in 1971 could only be accurately reported from inside a state of maximum perceptual distortion. The drugs are not the point. The point is the death of the 1960s dream — the specific moment when the wave broke and rolled back, when the possibility that had seemed real revealed itself to have been a story people were telling themselves, and what was left when the story stopped. The formal invention of Gonzo journalism is inseparable from the political argument it makes: that the distance required for objective reporting is itself a lie, that the only honest account is the one that puts the reporter inside the experience and reports from there. The most important American political comedy on this shelf and the ancestor of everything from The Daily Show to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline — every satirist who has looked at American power and responded with laughter rather than despair learned something from how this works.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: North America
Voice: Written by a North America author
Themes: american dream political satire
Topics: death of the 1960s counterculture

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