2 The writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream captures the state of the American Dream at the end of the Sixties in a precise and accurate way like hardly any other contemporary novel. It implies all the ingredients that have coined the myth and the downfall of American values during this era: The myths of freedom and equality, the stories of success and free enterprise, the corruption of society through corruption, hypocrisy, paranoia and violence.

The novel describes the journey of two characters, Raoul Duke, a journalist, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, who are on their way across the desert to Las Vegas in order to find the American Dream. In this novel, Thompson unerringly recapitulates the development the American Dream has taken in the 1960s in America and accurately describes the state of the American Dream in the United States society under the presidency of Richard Nixon at the beginning of the Seventies. It is indeed, as the subtitle of the novel suggests “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.”

From 1968 on, Hunter S. Thompson was working on a book for Random House which had the death of the American Dream as its subject. In order to research this somewhat ill-defined and imprecise issue, Thompson started collecting all hints for the death of the American Dream he could find in newspapers and magazines, in publications by the government or organizations like the National Rifle Association, the Conservative Book Club or the Students for a Democratic Society. Several letters to his editor, Jim Silberman, written from 1968 until well into the beginning of the Seventies suggest the limbo he found himself stuck in: In spite of the fact that he found numerous proofs that the end of the 1960s had seen the death of the illusion of a better society as it had been aspired by the counterculture in the beginning of the decade, Thompson seemed unable to come to terms with his difficult task.

While he kept missing one deadline after another and grew increasingly frustrated with debts and a constant feeling of failure, around him American society crumbled under a surge of violence and hatred. In the summer of 1968, one month before the eruption of violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, he wrote: “Actually, I hadn’t realized what a savage, stupid and dissolute nation this is until I began to clip every article that related to the death of the American Dream”. And the same notion is expressed only two weeks later: “The massive “American Dream” filing system that I started building on my return from NY is a bummer. The brute weight of it all has paralyzed my head, flooded my drawers and caused me to initiate a vast shelf building program ... which is not so crucial as the vicious depression that I’ve pulled down on myself by using this awful focus. There is absolutely no humor in the Death of the American Dream. I can’t get out from under it; we are caving in, I’m sure, and it’s happening so fast that only the daily papers can keep up. There is no good news, none.” It took him almost three years to finally escape from this mantrap he found himself caught in, and when it happened, Thompson at first did not even realize he had found the right approach to handle a topic as complex as this one.

In fact, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas emerged as a by-project to an article Thompson meant to write for the Rolling Stone magazine about the murder of Ruben Salazar in Los Angeles. Salazar, who wrote for the Los Angeles Times at the time, had been killed during a mass protest of the Chicano civil rights movement in the summer of 1970 by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy shooting a tear gas shell at him. The sheriff’s office first tried to camouflage its responsibility for the journalist’s death and blamed it on snipers or rioters, but the evidences and the witnesses argued against this misrepresentation. Ruben Salazar became a martyr and a symbol for the suppression of the Los Angeles Chicano movement. Tensions were high, and for Thompson - who had no insight knowledge of the Chicano movement - it was difficult to gain information. So he contacted his friend, Oscar Zeta Acosta, in Los Angeles and went to see if he could help with his article. Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson had met in 1967 when Acosta came to Woody Creek, Colorado.

This encounter was the start of a long friendship during which they frequently met and regularly wrote each other letters. Thompson remarked about their relationship: “The thing I liked about Oscar was that he was always willing to go further than I was”. Acosta was one of the leading figures of the Chicano “Brown Power” civil-rights movement of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. He was born in 1935 as the son of Mexican immigrants in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in Riverbank, California, later served in the Air Force and started studying Law in the beginning of the 1960s. He radically strove for social and economical equality for Chicanos and represented them as a lawyer in court. At the same time he wanted to find and manifest his Mexican-American identity in various screen-plays and novels. He regularly sent his writing attempts to Thompson and asked for his critique. In 1972 he published the first of his two semi-autobiographical novels,

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; the second one, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, was published in 1973. One year later Acosta disappeared during a trip in Mexico; the exact circumstances about his probable death are unknown up until today.

Nevertheless, the deep involvement of Acosta into the Chicano movement did not facilitate Thompson’s work on the Salazar article. He felt uncomfortable and awkward, describing himself as “a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia”, because of the constant presence of militant Chicano activists around Acosta.

When the opportunity arose to go to Las Vegas in order to cover a motorcycle race, the Mint 400, for the Sports Illustrated magazine in the beginning of 1971, Thompson took it and asked Acosta to come along, all expenses paid, because he hoped to be able to gather more information on the Salazar piece than he could in the tense atmosphere of Los Angeles. Acosta agreed to come along and thus began “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.” He had, finally managed to find an approach to his long pondered subject of the death of the American Dream - and despite his foreboding it was possible to insert humor into this dark topic.

Thompson wrote the first part of the novel after his return from the Mint 400 - in the evenings, while finishing the Salazar piece during the day (the article on Ruben Salazar was later published under the title “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” in the Rolling Stone magazine in April, 1971). The article Thompson had written on the motorcycle race was “aggressively rejected” by the editors of Sports Illustrated who had expected about 250 words in order to fill the captions for the photographs. But Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, and David Felton, one of the Rolling Stone editors, liked what they read and their enthusiasm encouraged Thompson to return to Las Vegas and take part in the National District Attorneys Association’s Third Annual Institute of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in April 1971 in order to write a second part to the Las Vegas article. The two accounts of the adventures of Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, taken together were planned to be published as two articles in the Rolling Stone magazine and would also make a short book for Random House - Thompson still had to fulfill his assignment of a book on the death of the American Dream.