The Rum Diary

The Rum Diary is an early novel by Hunter S. Thompson, written in the early 1960s from material drawn largely from his own experience. Thompson began the manuscript in 1959, when he was a young journalist still searching for his footing, and kept revising it through much of that decade. He eventually sold it to Random House after they agreed to publish his first book, Hell's Angels, but as time passed he found it increasingly hard to write about an era that was receding. He abandoned the project and the novel did not appear until 1998, when the manuscript, long kept among his papers, was finally released. Excerpts had already been published in 1990 in his collection Songs of the Doomed.

Set in the late 1950s, the novel follows Paul Kemp, a New York journalist who moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to work for an English-language newspaper. There he shares a newsroom and a social world with other Americans who drink heavily, compete with one another and entangle themselves in jealousy and reckless desire. The love story is bound up with the island's nightlife, its corruption and the uneasy position of foreigners in a colonial setting. Thompson had really gone to San Juan in 1960 to work at a short-lived sports paper, and he drew on that stint for the setting and for many of the characters, which he reshaped into fiction.

The book also deals with a fear of growing old and of falling behind, a notable preoccupation for a writer of twenty-two. Its fast, restless prose already shows features that would define Thompson's later work. He hoped to write the great American novel and was dissatisfied with this early effort; the 1998 release was marketed as a long lost novel, though it had never truly been lost. It sold well, and it was adapted into a film in 2011, written and directed by Bruce Robinson, with Johnny Depp in the lead role.