In 1970 journalist Hunter S. Thompson set out to write an article on the death of Mexican American news reporter Rubén Salazar at the hands of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department while covering the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. Thomson met with attorney, writer and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta who was to be his central source for the article. However the two men found the atmosphere of Los Angeles to tense to talk openly. Thompson had been asked by another magazine to help cover the Mint 400 – an annual race through the Mojave desert. The two decided to take advantage of this assignment and head to Las Vegas. Thompson completed the article that would be titled “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” as well as his assignment on the Mint 400 but the drunken and drug fuelled antics of that now legendary road trip would become the basis of Thompson’s semi-biographical novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
In this roman à clef Thompson takes on the name Raoul Duke and assigns Acosta the pseudonym Doctor Gonzo. Duke is a journalist sent to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400. He and his attorney Doctor Gonzo acquire a fast red spots car and all the drugs they can get their hands on before driving to the city of sin in a drug fuelled haze. Their time in Las Vegas becomes increasingly more chaotic as strange substances are taken, hotel rooms are trashed and deadlines loom closer. Artist and friend of the author Ralph Steadman would provide several illustrations for the book. His twisted figures serve as a perfect companion to the story.

Originally met with mixed responses due to its loose plot and controversial subject matter the novel was eventually recognised as a modern American classic. It would find its way into the hands of a new generation thanks to a cult classic film adaptation released in 1998 directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro in the leading roles.
Like many I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” as a teenager after I seen the film. At the time the psychedelic adventure and Thompson’s antiauthoritarian attitude appealed to me. Last week I re-read it for the first time and I’m glad that I did. The wild antics still amuse me and the weird humour still makes me laugh. But what really stood out to me this time was Raoul Dukes sense of anxiety and paranoia – his fear and his loathing – that consumes him as he walks out of the hotel leaving his sky high room service bill unpaid, as he disposes of his incriminating rental car and taking out a few one on bad credit and then checks into a hotel full of cops to cover the District Attorney’s Convention on Narcotics with a suitcase packed full of highly illegal substances.
But wild antics aside in this book Hunter S. Thompson managed to capture the world-feeling of early 1970s America. Images of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war illuminate a television screen as Duke comes down from a bad acid trip. Scattered references to the Manson family expose the scar that the Cielo Drive murders left on the American psyche. Thompson shows just how out of touch the establishment were as a passel of police officers listen to an alleged expert give an inaccurate lecture on a drug culture long gone. But most notably Thompson discusses the fading American Dream and in a sobering section often dubbed “the wave speech” he explores the anticlimactic end of the counterculture of the 1960s.