About the Book
This astonishing volume of private correspondence, a critically acclaimed follow-up to The Proud Highway, shows Hunter S. Thompson as brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever. 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.
About the Author :
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books on politics and society were regarded as groundbreaking among journalists, and he was celebrated as one of the early practitioners of an outraged, irreverent form of highly subjective journalism that became known as gonzo journalism. His numerous articles for Rolling Stone and books like Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas brought him wide recognition and cultlike status.
Douglas Brinkley is an acclaimed historian and award-winning author of many books, including six New York Times bestsellers. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him "America's New Past Master." His book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and his two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize. Other awards he has won include the Frances K. Hutchison Medal, Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Lifetime Heritage Award. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies.
David Halberstam graduated from Harvard, where he had served as managing editor of the daily Harvard Crimson. It was 1955, a year after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. Halberstam went south and began his career as the one reporter on the West Point, Mississippi, Daily Times Leader. He was fired after ten months there and went to work for the Nashville Tennessean. When the sit-ins broke out in Nashville in February 1960, he was assigned to the story as principal reporter. He joined the New York Times later that year, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his early reports from Vietnam. He has received every other major journalistic award, and is a member of the Society of American Historians.
Malcolm Hillgartner is an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. Named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013 and the recipient of several Earphones Awards, he has narrated over 250 audiobooks.
Review :
"A biting self-portrait of a comic genius, a man whose greatest creation of all was himself."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"A vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism...Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave--bracing...These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest."
-- "Nelson Algren, National Book Award-winning author "
"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."
-- "Kurt Vonnegut "
"Hunter's life and times are our life and times, and, oh, how wicked we've been."
-- "Booklist"
"The collection...stands as an extremely valuable historical document and a testament to Thompson's lasting importance as both journalist and stylist."
-- "Village Voice"
"There are only two adjectives writers care about anymore...brilliant and outrageous...and Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them."
-- "Tom Wolfe"
"Thompson altered permanently the nature of political journalism by injecting into his reportage the personal and the pathological, and this second volume of letters reads like rehearsals for his more public utterances, almost every page ringing with the sound of gunfire, revving motorcycle engines and partying that began at a level where most partying ends. What may surprise readers is the sweetness of much of the writing. While Thompson's correspondents include a virtual who's who of the era, from Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut to Jimmy Carter and George McGovern, he wrote to his fans like a kind if slightly deranged uncle, trying to convince one not to join the Hell's Angels, offering a second help with her term paper. Despite the occasional lollipop, however, Thompson's strong suit is still invective, of which he remains the unsurpassed master."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"Thompson should be recognized for contributing some of the clearest, most bracing, and fearless analysis of the possibilities and failures of American democracy in the past century. Reading through this latest collection of letters, one cannot but agree with him as he proclaims, 'I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both musical instrument and political weapon.'"
-- "Chicago Tribune"
"Thompson was after what F. Scott Fitzgerald called 'the high white note, ' and this collection is a symphony of such celestial peaks of excitement, humor, and wisdom."
-- "Entertainment Weekly"
"What we have here is vintage Hunter S. Thompson, a literary orgy of wicked irreverence."
-- "Boston Globe"
He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial."
-- "Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author "
