Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
Summary
Journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney travel to Las Vegas on a drug fueled assignment that spirals away from any actual reporting into a hallucinatory tour of American excess, greed, and the wreckage of 1960s idealism. Thompson pioneered what he called gonzo journalism, inserting himself as an unreliable, chemically altered narrator whose distorted perceptions become the real subject of the piece. The book became a defining document of countercultural disillusionment in the years immediately following the collapse of the era's utopian hopes.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1971 National Book Award for fiction went to Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, a work of high literary seriousness far removed from Thompson's drug soaked satire. Thompson's genre bending book, straddling journalism and fiction, was never a natural contender for any fiction prize of its era in any case.