Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, first published in 1971 as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1972, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. It belongs to the style Thompson called gonzo journalism, a blend of real events, fiction, personal impressions and exaggeration that blurs the line between reportage and storytelling. It is largely a roman à clef: the protagonist, Raoul Duke, is an alter ego of Thompson himself, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, is inspired by Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Chicano activist and lawyer who accompanied him.

The book grew out of two trips to Las Vegas in the spring of 1971. The first was nominally an assignment to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race, though Thompson's real aim was to talk with Acosta about the killing of journalist Rubén Salazar in Los Angeles, a city where tensions made open conversation between a Mexican American and a white reporter difficult. In Las Vegas the assignment expanded. The second trip, in April, covered a conference of prosecutors on narcotics and gave Thompson material for the theme of the American Dream that shapes the novel's second half. He wrote much of the manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, while finishing his article on Salazar.

The plot follows Duke and Dr. Gonzo on a disordered journey through the city, with continuous drug use driving the narrative: mescaline, LSD, ether, marijuana and other substances feature in scenes that mix humour, delirium and paranoia. The two accumulate scandals, scams and brawls, while often presenting themselves as lucid observers of a nation in crisis. The novel is not told in a straight line, and the narrator's drug-altered perception distorts time as well, so that episodes which happened weeks apart in reality are compressed into a few days.

The book is widely read as a critical view of the end of the 1960s counterculture, seen from disillusionment. Its portrait of Las Vegas, a symbol of consumerism and tourism, serves to expose the decay of American popular culture. A famous passage, the so-called wave speech, captures the sense of a movement that had lost its momentum and innocence. The novel was warmly received, especially by young readers, and became a cult classic. It influenced generations of journalists and writers and was adapted to film in 1998 by Terry Gilliam, with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro in the leading roles.