Hunter S. Thompson

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Florida

A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Records the experiences of a free-lance writer who embarked on a zany journey into the drug culture

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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Connecticut

A Strange and Terrible Saga

Gonzo journalist and literary roustabout Hunter S. Thompson flies with the angels--Hell's Angels, that is--in this short work of nonfiction.
 
"California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur. . . The Menace is loose again."
 
Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson's vivid account of his experiences with California's most notorious motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels. In the mid-1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial Angels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, "For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson's book is a thoughtful piece of work." As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell's Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend.

Hell's Angels

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'A phalanx of motorcycles came roaring over the hill from the west . . .the noise was like a landslide, or a wing of bombers passing over. Even knowing the Angels I couldn't quite handle what I was seeing. It was like Genghis Khan, Morgan's Raiders, the Wild One and the rape of Nanking all at once.' Huge bikes, filthy denim and an aura of barely contained violence; the Hell's Angels could paralyse whole towns with fear, so terrible was their reputation. But how much of that reputation was myth and how much was brutal reality? Only one man could discover the truth about these latter-day barbarians; Hunter Stockton Thompson, creator of Gonzo journalism, the man who saw the fear and loathing in the heart of the American dream. This counter-culture classic is the hair-raising result.

Hunter Thompson

Pennsylvania

A Novel

The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.

The Rum Diary

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'The Rum Diary', the story of a drunken young journalist, is Thompson's only work of fiction.|PB

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

The 50th-anniversary edition of the classic, savagely comic account of a trip to Las Vegas that came to represent what happened to America in the 1960s—and a founding document of “gonzo journalism”—featuring the original artwork by Ralph Steadman and a new introduction by Caity Weaver First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is told through Hunter S. Thompson’s story of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and “check it out.” The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, it has “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.” This 50th-anniversary Modern Library edition features Ralph Steadman’s original drawings, a new introduction by New York Times writer Caity Weaver, and three companion pieces selected by Thompson: “Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” and “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories

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First Pocket Books trade paperback printing 1991.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

North Carolina

More Notes on the Death of the American Dream

In this third and most extraordinary volume of the Gonzo Papers, Thompson recalls high and hideous moments in his 30 years in the Passing Lane. With insight and integrity, the prince of Gonzo journalism charts the long, strange trip from Kennedy to Quayle.

Songs of the Doomed

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A collection of essays by Hunter Thompson that chart the high and low moments of his thirty-year career as a journalist.

Brand new condition. Stored with care. No odors, smoke free home.

Michigan

Confessions of a Political Junkie

An odyssey through the American electoral process provides insights and observations on the 1992 presidential campaign

Better Than Sex

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Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk

Sports, politics, and sex collide in Hunter S. Thompson’s wildly popular ESPN.com columns. From the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and father of “Gonzo” journalism comes Hey Rube. Insightful, incendiary, outrageously brilliant, such was the man who galvanized American journalism with his radical ideas and gonzo tactics. For over half a century, Hunter S. Thompson devastated his readers with his acerbic wit and uncanny grasp of politics and history. His reign as "The Unabomber of contemporary letters" (Time) is more legendary than ever with Hey Rube. Fear, greed, and action abound in this hilarious, thought-provoking compilation as Thompson doles out searing indictments and uproarious rants while providing commentary on politics, sex, and sports—at times all in the same column. With an enlightening foreword by ESPN executive editor John Walsh, critics' favorites, and never-before-published columns, Hey Rube follows Thompson through the beginning of the new century, revealing his queasiness over the 2000 election ("rigged and fixed from the start"); his take on professional sports (to improve Major League Baseball "eliminate the pitcher"); and his myriad controversial opinions and brutally honest observations on issues plaguing America―including the Bush administration and the inequities within the American judicial system. Hey Rube gives us a lasting look at the gonzo journalist in his most organic form―unbridled, astute, and irreverent.

Hey Rube

William J. Kennedy

Brand new condition. 
Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists--Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who's Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez--not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors--Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective. Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedented and penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Kansas

Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman

The private correspondence of America's outlaw journalist provides a look at Thompson's personal relationships from the mid-1950s through 1967

The Proud Highway

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Texas

A Short Story

Hunter S. Thompson's legions of fans have waited a decade for this book.

They will not be disappointed. His notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of three hundred fine collectors' copies and twenty-six leather-bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here -- "Mescalito," published in Thompson's 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed -- has been available to the public, making the trade edition of Screwjack a major publishing event.
"We live in a jungle of pending disasters," Thompson warns in "Mescalito," a chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969 -- including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream-of-consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it.
Screwjack just gets weirder with its second offering, "Death of a Poet." As Thompson describes this trailer-park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: "Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train."
The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale "Screwjack" so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man's burden: that "we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School
...and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again."
Ostensibly written by Raoul Duke, "Screwjack" begins with an editor's note explaining of Thompson's alter ego that "the first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life...." "I am guilty, Lord," Thompson writes, "but I am also a lover -- and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you...."
Nor has Hunter S. Thompson been to American literature. Quite the contrary: What the legendary Gonzo journalist proves with Screwjack is just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is, amid all the hilarity. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here "build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff....That is the Desired Effect".

Screwjack

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Hunter S. Thompson was so outside the box, a new word was invented just to define him: Gonzo. He was a journalist who mocked all the rules, a hell-bent fellow who loved to stomp on his own accelerator, the writer every other writer tried to imitate. In these brutally candid and very funny interviews that range across his fabled career, Thompson reveals himself as mad for politics, which he thought was both the source of the country’s despair and, just maybe, the answer to it. At a moment when politics is once again roiling America, we need Thompson’s guts and wild wisdom more than ever.

Browse by categories

Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson

Hell's Angels

Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diary

Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories

Hunter S. Thompson

Songs of the Doomed

Hunter S. Thompson

Better Than Sex

Hunter S. Thompson

Hey Rube

Hunter S. Thompson

The Proud Highway

Hunter S. Thompson

Screwjack

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories