How Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-fuelled bender became a cult novel

This story was originally published by The Economist.

August 12, 2021

WHEN HUNTER S. THOMPSON left Los Angeles for Las Vegas in 1971, in the company of Oscar Acosta, a Mexican-American lawyer and Chicano activist, he did not mean to write a cult novel. Thompson was working on a piece about Ruben Salazar, a Mexican-American journalist killed the previous year by a tear-gas canister fired by police during a march against the Vietnam war. Acosta, his main source, was worried about being seen with a white writer—but agreed to go with Thompson to Las Vegas, where he was due to produce the captions for a series of photographs of the Mint 400 off-road desert race. The roman à clef that arose from the trip, published in two parts in Rolling Stone that autumn, was an elusive blend of fact and fiction, observation and exaggeration.

Continue reading →