Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, novel, presented as journalism and laden with autobiographical detail, written by Hunter S. Thompson and published in 1971.

First published in Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971 and credited to “sports editor” Raoul Duke, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has one of the most recognizable first lines in modern literature: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Thompson’s roman à clef, subtitled “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream,” tells the story of the narrator’s chemical-fueled sojourn in and around Las Vegas in the manic company of his Samoan attorney, in reality the thinly disguised Mexican American activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, on an assignment to cover an off-road dune-buggy-and-motorbike race called the Mint 400 for a New York sporting magazine. Having spent his advance on a trunkload of illegal drugs, the pair begin their adventure at a crazed pitch, abandoning any sense of personal responsibility. This frenzy intensifies when they hit the city and, among other questionable decisions, decide to hole up in a hotel which is hosting the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

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The heroes’ self-indulgence is simply American over-consumption turned up many notches in a parodic take-off of thoughtless consumerism. At the same time, the journey is an extreme but somehow admirable celebration of traditional American freedoms, during Richard Nixon’s first term as U.S. president, while the war in Vietnam is being waged, and scandalously punitive jail sentences are being handed out at home for draft-card burners and marijuana smokers. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is experienced through doors of perception, which are set so fantastically awry that no one can be said to know for sure what just happened, what is happening, and what might happen. Thompson’s book provides an invigorating and hilarious demolition job on the ultimate postmodern city, suggesting that the best way to resist Vegas’s rapacious demands is to alter your reality so entirely beforehand that you are altogether unable to respond in the way which the city commands that you do. It is also a lament for the lost ideals of the 1960s counterculture as it dissipated in self-indulgence: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning,” Thompson writes. “We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave … 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.”

Thompson adapted his book as the screenplay for the critically lambasted and commercially unsuccessful film Where the Buffalo Roam, released in 1980 and starring Bill Murray and Peter Boyle. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was adapted by Terry Gilliam as a film, released in 1998, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. As to whether the book is fiction or journalism, Thompson once told an interviewer, “I never have quite figured out how the reader is supposed to know the difference.”