Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

For the 1998 film adaptation of the novel, see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film).

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Early edition cover.
Author	Hunter S. Thompson
Illustrator	Ralph Steadman
Language	English
Genre	Gonzo Journalism
Publisher	Random House
Publication date	11 November 1971 and 25 November 1971
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	204 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-679-78589-2

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Because of its roots in autobiographical incidents, the book is often considered a roman à clef. The story follows 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.

Origins

The book is a largely fictionalized account of Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta's actual 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 Police 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. 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 and a "scorching epochal sensation" by author Tom Wolfe.

Plot summary

Journalist Raoul Duke and attorney Dr. Gonzo travel to Las Vegas in 1971 to cover a motorcycle race for a sports magazine and enjoy a haphazardly planned vacation. As Duke and Gonzo live out the final days of the counter-culture through the use of drugs like LSD, Cocaine and speed, they wreck cars, hallucinate with visions of desert animals and, eventually, begin to mistrust each other. The book ends, ironically enough, with Raoul and Dr. Gonzo revisiting Las Vegas for a law enforcement narcotics convention.

Major themes

The book was an attempt to place the radical activism and drug culture of the 1960s into the context of what was the mainstream American experience at the time. It explores the idea that 1971 was a turning point in hippie and drug culture in America, when the countercultural movement no longer had momentum and its innocence and optimism of the late 1960s turned to cynicism.

Throughout the novel, the main characters go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess. Much of Las Vegas is used to symbolize the ugliness of mainstream American culture, to which the characters give little respect.

Some have suggested that the book's themes resemble those of The Great Gatsby, which deals with the state of the American Dream and the lives of the rich and careless. Others have surmised that the white Cadillac Journalist Raoul Duke drives (referred to as the "White Whale" in the book) is an allusion to the white whale in Moby Dick, symbolically representative of good and evil and a metaphor for elements of life that are out of people's control.

The "wave speech"

The "wave speech" is an important passage that appears about a third of the way through the novel, at the end of the eighth chapter. Thompson considered the "wave speech" to be "probably the finest thing I've ever written." It tries to capture the zeitgeist of the hippie era, and the way it came to an end.

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Many have stated that this passage was Thompson’s favorite part of the novel and the piece of writing he was the most proud of. He would often cite it during interviews and read it when he was asked to read a portion of the novel out loud.

Title

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has become Thompson's most famous work and is referred to, in shorthand as, "Fear and Loathing". However, Thompson would later use the phrase "Fear and Loathing" as the main title of many other published essays and books.

Some have suggested that Thompson borrowed the phrase from a 1918 translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which on page 183 reads 'his father, his governess and his nurse all not only disliked Vronsky, but regarded him with fear and loathing, though they said nothing about him, while his mother regarded him as her best friend.'

Thompson himself first used the phrase in a letter to a friend written in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, describing how he felt about whoever had shot President John F. Kennedy.

Reactions to the Novel

When the novel was first published in the summer of 1972, many critics did not appreciate the novel’s lack of a cohesive plot and the excessive drug use of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. However, these reviewers understood that, while the novel lacked a plot, Thompson had written a work that was going to become a very important part of American literature.

In his review for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt told readers to not “even bother” with the novel and “what goes on in these pages make[s] Lenny Bruce seem angelic.” However, Lehmann-Haupt went on to acknowledge that the true importance of the novel was not the plot or actions of the characters but Thompson’s method. “The whole book boils down to a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer’s An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out.”

As the book gained popularity, the reviews of the work became more and more positive. Crawford Woods, another reviewer for the New York Times, wrote a second, significantly more positive, review of the work a few weeks after Lehmann-Haupt’s. According to Woods, the novel is “a custom-crafted study of paranoia, a spew from the 1960’s and -in all its hysteria, insolence, insult and rot - a desperate and important book, a wired nightmare, the funniest piece of American prose.” He also said “this book is such a mind storm that we may need a little time to know that it is also literature…it unfolds a parable of the nineteen-sixties to those of us who lived in them in a mood –perhaps more melodramatic than astute -of social strife, surreal politics and the chemical feast.” Of Thompson himself, Woods said that he “trusts the authority of his senses, and the clarity of a brain posed between brilliance and burnout.”

Over time the novel became a benchmark in American literature about the 1960s and early 1970s. Chris Morris from Billboard wrote, “through Duke and Gonzo's drug-addled shenanigans amid the seediness of the desert pleasure palaces, it perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the post-'60s era.” Mikal Gilmore from Rolling Stone wrote that the novel “peers into the best and worst mysteries of the American heart” and sought to understand how the American dream had turned a gun on itself.” Gilmore believes that “the fear and loathing Thompson was writing about — a dread of both interior demons and the psychic landscape of the , nation around him — wasn't merely his own; he was also giving voice to the mind-set of a generation that had held high ideals and was now crashing hard against the walls of American reality.”

While there is still some controversy concerning the excessive drug use in the novel and how much of the work is truly autobiographical, the novel itself has become a standard for many students of American literature.

The Novel as a work of Gonzo Journalism

Main article: Gonzo Journalism

In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a failed experiment in gonzo journalism," a guerrilla style of reporting that Thompson championed and publicized throughout his career. Thompson said his idea of Gonzo journalism was based on William Faulkner's idea that "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism — and the best journalists have always known this." Thompson's style tended to blend storytelling, fiction, and traditional journalism.

He called it a "failed" experiment because he originally intended to record all the details of his trip to Las Vegas as they happened, and then publish the raw, unedited notes. However, the novel ultimately underwent numerous revisions during the spring and summer of 1971. For example, the novel describes Duke attending both the motorcycle race and the narcotics convention within a few days time, while in real life the actual events took place over a month apart.. Thompson later wrote that "I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism".

Despite Thompson’s declaration that ‘‘Fear and Loathing’’ was a “failed experiment”, many others have heralded the work as Thompson’s crowning achievement in Gonzo Journalism. One critic noted that the novel “feels free wheeling when you read it [but] it doesn't feel accidental. The writing is right there, on the page — startling, unprecedented and brilliantly crafted.”

The Illustrations

Main article: Ralph Steadman

The beautifully grotesque illustrations in ‘‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’’ are a huge part of understanding the story. These illustrations were done by Ralph Steadman. Steadman had first met Thompson when Scanlan's Monthly hired Steadman to do the illustrations for Thompson’s first venture into Gonzo Journalism called “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.”

Many critics have hailed Steadman’s illustrations another main character of the novel and the perfect companion to Thompson’s disjointed narrative. The New York Times noted that “Steadman's drawings were stark and crazed and captured Thompson's sensibility, his notion that below the plastic American surface lurked something chaotic and violent. The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen as monsters.”

Film Adaptation

Main article: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film)

Due to the popularity of the novel, there were many attempts to make a film out of the novel.

Oscar winning directors Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone both attempted to get a film version of the novel off the ground but their efforts were unsuccessful. Also, at one point, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were attached to play Duke and Gonzo, respectively. However, the production was stalled many years and both actors grew too old to do the characters justice. After Nicholson and Brando, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered but after Belushi’s death plans for the film were scrapped.

The film was almost made in 1989 when director Terry Gilliam was given a copy of the script by illustrator Ralph Steadman. However, Gilliam was busy with other projects and felt that the script “didn’t capture the story properly.” In 1997, Gilliam was given another version of the script and felt that this was the right time to sign on to direct. The film starred Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo respectively and was released in 1998.

See also

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film)
• Hunter S. Thompson

Editions

• ISBN 0-679-78589-2 (paperback, 1999)
• ISBN 0-679-60298-4

External links

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at IMDb
• The Great Thompson Hunt
• Book Review by Nick Christenson
• Las Vegas Sun investigation into the actual historical events surrounding the book. Includes many other FLLV-related articles.