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The Fear and Loathing Letters #2

Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist - The Gonzo Letters, Volume II, 1968-1976

hunter s. thompson douglas brinkley david halberstam

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From the king of "Gonzo" journalism and bestselling author who brought you Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes another astonishing volume of letters by Hunter S. Thompson.

Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, this second volume of Thompson's private correspondence is 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.

784 pages, Paperback

First published December 13,2000
Series
The Fear and Loathing Letters

This edition

Format
784 pages, Paperback
Published
December 4, 2001 by Simon \u0026 Schuster
ISBN
9780684873169
ASIN
0684873168
Language
English

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About the author

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hunter s. thompson

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KylerSnowBro
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This is a collection of letters written by Hunter Thompson between 1968-76. I read his book on the Hell's Angels and this one is pretty entertaining considering it's only a bunch of letters. Thompson is a unique personality. His ideas run to the extreme, but he's very intelligent and witty.
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kriemheld
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I liked this collection of letters better than "The Proud Highway" though that was great too. This volume focuses on the years when Thompson made his name as a writer with the publication of "Hells Angels" and also deals with the genesis of his most well known book, "Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas". A fascinating read by one of my favourite authors, we're fortunate he kept copies of all his letters, as the light they shed on his career and struggles with publishers etc is invaluable
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Lord_Odous
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Perhaps not as intimate or telling as Proud Highway-- still a blast. At this stage, HST had fine tuned his style and persona and the first person tales of guns, explosives, the 68 democratic convention and the flipped-out lunacy of the late 60's/ early 70's make for a very compelling read. I found it facinating to read how calculated his plans for Fear & Loathing in Las vegas were.
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damnmylord
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This one wasn't for me. As much as I adore Hunter S. Thompson this book was a bit too much on the political side. I know almost nothing about the politics that were going on at the time these letters were written and therefore I didn't really get what was going on during most of the book.

This book was way beyond my area of interest but had some lovely Hunter moments. 4/10.
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Pslams
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A great book to examine the dichotomy between Hunter S. Thompson, a man trying to scramble in the rat race and survive like the rest of us, and Raoul Duke, the characterization of Hunter S. Thompson. It also shows his development and meta-reflection on gonzo journalism over his prime years of 1968-1976.

A must for any HST fan and there are some gems of letters, especially the fragile, tense, and short relationship with his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas co-star, Oscar Zeta Acosta. Either way, you feel like an observer of Hunter's growth and development in a time needed for someone like him to zap the ugliness protruding out of every orifice of the so-called American Dream.

"...every once in a while I think it's healthy to clear the deck and lay a serious fireball on some of these bastards who lack either the grace or the integrity or both to understand that they can't have it both ways...the only sure and final cure is to write something so clearly and brutally original that only a fool would risk plagiarizing it....and that's what I'd like to do now..."Gonzo journalism" is essentially the "art" (or compulsion) of imposing a novelistic form on journalistic content...

...because on the high end is only one real difference between the two forms--and that is the rigidly vested interest in the maintenance of a polar (or strictly polarized) separation of "fiction" and "journalism" by at least two generations of New York-anchored writers who spent most of their working lives learning, practicing, and finally insisting (on) the esthetic validity of that separation...

...but for now the formal separation works in my favor, because it gives me a straw man to beat on, and stir the buggers up."
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PharuanUndearth
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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freaky way of learning about US history in the 60s/70s - and realizing that there are some people out there that are more crazy than you are.
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sodiumfluoride
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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HST is my favorite. He’s the best. That’s all I can say, I’m too biased in my opinion of him and his books.
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ConnorMoo17
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Just like F.A.L. In Las Vegas, but different setting with an ever wilder story. I really have began to enjoy Hunter Thompson books because they are just so abstract compared to any other real-world books. His adventures tripping in drugs give such an interesting twist to the story line, and being such a good writer makes the book read very fluently. I would recommend this book to a certain person, possibly anyone who is a little bit insane or whoever has the patients to comprehend his descriptive scenes.
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