Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo

Savage Journey

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Simpson Imprint in Humanities.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Chairman’s Circle of the University of California Press Foundation, whose members are: Elizabeth and David Birka-White, Harriett Gold, Maria and David Hayes-Bautista, Michael Hindus, Gary Kraut, Susan McClatchy, Lisa See, and Lynne Withey.

Savage Journey

Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo

PETER RICHARDSON

University of California Press

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Peter Richardson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Richardson, Peter, 1959– author.

Title: Savage journey : Hunter S. Thompson and the weird road to Gonzo / Peter Richardson.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021025600 (print) | LCCN 2021025601 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520304925 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520973244 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Thompson, Hunter S.—Criticism and interpretation. | Thompson, Hunter S.—Influence. | Journalists—United States—Biography. | American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Journalism

Classification: LCC PS3570.H62 Z86 2022 (print) | LCC PS3570.H62 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025600

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025601

Manufactured in the United States of America

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All this stuff avoids coming to the point that matters, which is what I turn out. Funny, I almost never get questioned about writing.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON, 1987

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1. BROODING

2. THE STORM OF LIFE

3. ROUGHING IT

4. OBSERVER

5. NEW JOURNALIST

6. HASHBURY

7. TOTALLY GONZO

8. ROLLING STONE

9. LAS VEGAS

10. CAMPAIGN TRAIL

11. AFTER NIXON

12. LEGACY

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations follow chapter 6

Introduction

More than five decades after the publication of his first bestselling book, Hunter S. Thompson remains a cultural icon. A steady stream of publications and films have told his remarkable story, several in detail. Most of these accounts—which feature his drug and alcohol consumption, gun fetish, and fortified compound—are centered in Woody Creek, Colorado, where Thompson lived from 1966 until his suicide in 2005.

Although Thompson’s books still find large audiences, his literary executor maintains that his greatest achievement was the collective work, and the fact that he created this one persona—the Hunter Figure—which is one of the great artistic creations of the 20th century. Douglas Brinkley is certainly correct that Thompson’s outlaw persona ensured his celebrity from the 1970s on. It also eclipsed his work and private identity. I’m really in the way as a person, Thompson said in 1978. The myth has taken over. Perhaps for this reason, his writing has received surprisingly little critical attention. Readers must consult various sources of uneven quality to learn about his influences, trademark style, and critical reception. In this sense, New York Times writer David Streitfeld observed, Thompson stands in front of his work, often obscuring it.

Studies of Thompson’s literary formation are especially thin on the ground. What little commentary we have is split over how, when, and where he became the author who wrote the works. Although his literary formation was a lengthy process, the evidence suggests that it was largely a San Francisco story. Like Mark Twain a century earlier, Thompson arrived in the city as an obscure journalist, thrived on its anarchic energy, and left as a national figure. Raoul Duke, Thompson’s narrator in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), famously reflects on that time and place. "You could strike sparks anywhere, Duke says. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning." Five years later, Duke notes, that feeling was gone, but Thompson had finally arrived.

Toward the end of his life, Thompson confirmed that Raoul Duke spoke for him. In his introduction to the 2003 edition of Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, Thompson detoured from the topic at hand—the 1972 presidential campaign—to reflect on his stint in San Francisco. At that time, he was surrounded by flower children with little interest in politics; even so, they presumed they would inherit the earth.

Exactly how they were going to take over the world without knowing, or wanting to know, anything about politics seemed like a pipe dream to me, but I didn’t mind dreaming it from time and time, and I also lived right in the middle of it for four years, and I definitely liked the neighborhood. These were my people—along with the Hell’s Angels, Ken Kesey, Bill Graham and the Fillmore Auditorium, the Golden Gate Bridge, Big Sur and all those who have ever lived there. The list is long, and I love it. San Francisco was clearly the best place in the world to be living in those years—1960–70, to be specific—and my memories of life in that purest of tornadoes still cause me to babble and jabber and dance.

Here and elsewhere, Thompson depicted his years in San Francisco, that purest of tornadoes, as a peak period. He rode with the Hell’s Angels, listened to Jefferson Airplane at The Matrix, and participated enthusiastically in the city’s drug culture. He read Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker, and wrote about Haight-Ashbury for the New York Times Magazine. His subsequent work for Rolling Stone magazine, which was founded in San Francisco after the Summer of Love, vaulted him to celebrity status.

The fact that Thompson identified his people in Crouse’s book is also notable. Although he is associated with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and other paragons of New Journalism, he rarely presented himself as a member of any group. (The NRA was a notable exception.) And though he was a skillful literary networker, he also took care to distinguish himself from his colleagues. "A good writer stands above movements, neither a leader nor a follower, but a bright white golf ball in a fairway of wind-blown daisies," he wrote to a friend in 1958. As a young man, Thompson even singled out Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for praise. Few critics hold that novel in high regard, but he thought its libertarian thrust affirmed a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able—or even have the courage—to achieve.

As that remark suggests, Thompson prized independence above all, but he needed help to achieve it. Like his idols, he lived far from the nation’s publishing capitals, and he used his correspondence to build and maintain his literary network. Taken as a whole, his letters demonstrate an extraordinary ability to charm, amuse, ingratiate, importune, threaten, and attack. That talent was not lost on editors, who frequently ran his missives in their magazines. Unspoiled by deadlines and editorial overreach, his letters to government officials, local television stations, and customer service departments rose to the level of art. One might even argue, as Thompson suggested more than once, that his correspondence was his most important work. Although his published letters represent a small fraction of that output, they also provide crucial insights into his literary formation and model of authorship.

Several assumptions inform what follows. The first has to do with Thompson’s collaborators. Although he was a rare talent, skilled editors shaped his output and career at virtually every stage. Carey McWilliams, the only editor whom Thompson unhesitatingly admired, gave Thompson the story idea for his first bestselling book. Warren Hinckle, whom Thompson called the best conceptual editor he ever worked with, helped birth Gonzo journalism at Scanlan’s Monthly. Jann Wenner, whose feeling for the zeitgeist was an essential part of Thompson’s success, did more than anyone to promote Thompson and his work. James Silberman, Alan Rinzler, David Rosenthal, and Marysue Ricci developed Thompson’s bestselling books at Random House, Straight Arrow Books, Bantam, and Simon & Schuster. In what follows, I pay particular attention to the roles these and other editors played in Thompson’s evolution as a writer.

Thompson’s key collaborator, however, was Ralph Steadman. Although Gonzo journalism is synonymous with Thompson’s output from 1970 on, Steadman’s illustrations were an indispensable part of its success. Thompson always understood this point, though it is frequently neglected by critics and commentators. By supplementing Thompson’s fantastical prose with powerful visual corollaries, Steadman shaped the reception of Gonzo journalism from the outset. Accordingly, I explore the potent combination of verbal and visual elements in their collaborations, trace the arc of their working relationship, and consider the extent to which Thompson drew on the illustrations for his own inspiration.

A related point is terminological. As a branding tool, Gonzo journalism served Thompson and Steadman well, but the label masks one of Thompson’s most significant achievements. Whenever necessary, Thompson shrugged off the protocols of journalism, even the relatively elastic ones of New Journalism, to tap the power of fiction. That practice, which also followed the example of his literary heroes, was not lost on his contemporaries. One political strategist remarked that Thompson’s description of the 1972 presidential race was the most accurate and least factual account of the campaign. Likewise, novelist William Kennedy observed that Thompson seemed to be writing journalism but was actually developing his fictional oeuvre. The Rum Diary, the only traditional novel published during his lifetime, wasn’t an important work of fiction, but it is a category error to classify Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as journalism or even nonfiction.

Finally, this book’s overarching goal—to take Thompson seriously as a writer—does not conflict with Douglas Brinkley’s claim that Thompson’s most important creation was his persona. It does, however, require us to square that creation with Thompson’s evolving model of authorship. There was nothing inevitable about Gonzo journalism, much less Thompson’s celebrity. His work responded to shifting conditions, unforeseen events, and fleeting opportunities. Moreover, we know that Thompson understood his literary achievement quite apart from his celebrity. In 1975, for example, he wrote to a Vietnamese colonel that he was one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. It was a canny assessment of his own standing, and in what follows, I explore the remarkable sequence of events and transformations that led Thompson to his unique niche in American letters.

The inaccessibility of Thompson’s archive has made that work more difficult. At the time of this writing, the archive is reportedly housed in a Los Angeles storage facility and contains some eight hundred boxes of material, including a massive trove of letters that Thompson began producing and saving as a youth. Authors often sell or donate their papers to research libraries to enable the scholarly study of their work, but Thompson’s archive was purchased in 2008 and has been held privately ever since. Critical neglect is never good for an author’s legacy, but it is much likelier when the archival material is sequestered. Until scholars can bring that material to bear on our understanding of Thompson’s work, he may be remembered as what his biographer, William McKeen, has called the favorite writer for a lot of people who don’t read. In the meantime, we must use the available resources to gauge Thompson’s achievement.

Although my primary interest is in Thompson’s literary output, many of my precursors have recognized the difficulty of disentangling the work from the person. Thompson was admired and even beloved by his vast network, including women who described him as a perfect southern gentleman. That picture, however, is complicated by the accounts of his closest family members, who recall an angry, domineering narcissist with a record of verbal and physical abuse. Some of Thompson’s language and attitudes were problematic even by the standards of his time, and his professional decline was closely linked to his vices. Less than a decade after his arrival on the national stage, he found it difficult to produce a sustained piece of writing without heroic (and largely unacknowledged) assistance from his colleagues. Even with that assistance, much of his writing after 1974 was lackluster. In some cases, he failed to produce any copy at all—or even to attend the event he was sent to cover. San Francisco figured in this later period as well. In the 1980s, Thompson cast himself as the night manager at the O’Farrell Theatre, which he described as the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America. It was a logical extension of his roguish persona, but he produced little writing of note, and his image tilted from louche to sordid. San Francisco, that purest of tornadoes in the 1960s, had turned into a blizzard of cocaine and live sex acts.

Even if we focus on the work instead of the person, the urge to moralize is unavoidable. Indeed, that desire arises from the work itself. Thompson’s writing was not produced—or meant to be read—in a moral vacuum. To the contrary, his best work delivered and invited moral judgments at every turn. As early as 1970, novelist James Salter called Thompson a moralist posing as an immoralist, and novelist Hari Kunzru’s 1998 review of Thompson’s edited correspondence made a similar point. "The true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist, Kunzru claimed, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him. That line is often used as a blurb, but the unabridged version was more specific. Kunzru described Thompson as a misshapen sort of moralist who was largely dismissed by those who require their writers to behave like grownups. That dismissal was a pity, Kunzru added, because Thompson’s capacity for mayhem was a minor side-effect of a personality that functions as a machine for exposing liars and hypocrites." Kunzru’s judgment returns us to Streitfeld’s point—that Thompson stands in front of his work and often obscures it—but it also calls us to reconsider that work and its durable appeal. Having done so, I would argue that Thompson was not only an accomplished journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

Rereading Thompson also prompted a wish: that he could have called out the stupidity, cruelty, fraudulence, and corruption that followed his departure from the national stage. As I write these lines, the nation is recoiling from an attack on the US Capitol while Congress was affirming the results of the 2020 election. That spectacle, which left five persons dead, is only the latest in a series of outrages that Donald Trump has inflicted on the nation. Far more lethal was his abject mishandling of a pandemic that so far has claimed 360,000 American lives and ravaged the economy. Equal parts clown show, conspicuous grift, and killing machine, Trump’s misrule caught his rivals and the media flatfooted. Even more dispiriting is the fact that, after four years of dividing and demoralizing the nation, Trump racked up 74 million votes in his failed reelection bid.

Thompson would not have been surprised by Donald Trump, his supporters, or the media’s reaction to them. His Hell’s Angels coverage previewed the politics of resentment, and though his commentary was hyperbolic, it seems prophetic now. He would have argued that Trump was the misbegotten product of the modern conservative movement, and that covering him objectively normalized his depredations. Even misshapen moralists, if they are sufficiently talented, can play an important role in such times. In Thompson’s case, it is not his virtue but rather his virtuosity that draws me back, again and again, to his writing and the forces that shaped it. For all of his shortcomings, I now regard his relentless attacks on hypocrisy and mendacity, both in American politics and the media, as a moral force that is too rarely acknowledged and appreciated.

Richmond, California

January 6, 2021

1

Brooding

In the frosty hours before dawn in January 1970, Hunter S. Thompson composed a lengthy letter to his editor at Random House. For more than a decade, the 32-year-old Thompson had used confident, razor-sharp correspondence to build and maintain his literary network. Written over several days from Owl Farm, his home near Aspen, this letter was different. Its tone was anxious, even desperate. He needed help.

Thompson owed James Silberman a book. The contract called for a manuscript by August 1967, and Thompson was almost two and half years late. In his letter, Silberman noted archly that the project was now in its second decade. Thompson claimed to welcome the reminder, which came as something of a relief. I’d been expecting it for months—like a demand note on a long overdue mortgage.

Thompson’s debut effort, published three years earlier, had come together quickly. It began as a magazine assignment while Thompson was living in San Francisco. After spending several weeks with the Hell’s Angels, he produced a story about the motorcycle gang for The Nation magazine. After it ran in May 1965, he received a dozen contract offers for a book on the same topic. Silberman met him at a bar in North Beach, spiritual home of the Beats, before repairing to Thompson’s home near the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Ballantine Books was already planning to produce the paperback edition, but Silberman purchased the hardcover rights for Random House and eventually edited the book. After receiving the first part of his advance, Thompson wrote to Charles Kuralt, a friend who would later anchor CBS News Sunday Morning. Thompson confided that he would rather receive a fat advance for his novel; nevertheless, this offer was too good to pass up. Instead of repaying a small loan to Kuralt, Thompson reclaimed the guns and camera gear he had hocked.

Thompson spent the next year consorting with the motorcycle gang and finished the manuscript in a four-day rush fueled by bourbon and Dexedrine. Published in 1967, the book was a critical and commercial success. Still short of funds, Thompson accepted an advance from Random House for a novel and two more works of nonfiction. He had already drafted The Rum Diary, a novel based on his stint in Puerto Rico. One of the nonfiction works was supposed to be about the death of the American Dream.

That trope had a patchy history. Shortly after the Civil War, Horatio Alger popularized the rags-to-riches stories that showcased America’s promise of opportunity. His first success, Ragged Dick, appeared two years after Alger resigned from the ministry following sexual abuse charges. It told the story of a poor boy who parlayed his positive attitude and work ethic into middle-class prosperity and respectability. It also became the template for Alger’s young adult fiction, which Ernest Hemingway casually lampooned in The Sun Also Rises. But it wasn’t until 1931 that James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream as such. The idea, Adams wrote, was not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely. Rather, it was a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. Hollywood film studios stripped down that bloated formulation, applied some schmaltz, and sold the American Dream to the masses. It was still about opportunity, but the movies added stable families, Main Street virtue, and little guys beating the odds.

Thompson never missed a chance to mention Horatio Alger, but he subscribed to an older version of the American Dream. For him, it was roughly equivalent to what historian Richard Hofstadter called the myth of the happy yeoman. In his seminal 1956 article, Hofstadter argued that early American political rhetoric was drawn irresistibly to the noncommercial, nonpecuniary, self-sufficient aspect of American farm life. That Jeffersonian ideal, which was broadly accepted in the second half of the eighteenth century, featured independent farmers whose civic rectitude would guide the new nation. The myth’s appeal never depended on its descriptive power. Oddly enough, Hofstadter noted, the agrarian myth came to be believed more widely and tenaciously as it became more fictional. Even as the United States became more urban, industrial, corporate, and unionized, Americans longed to see themselves as independent agents.

Thompson went to extraordinary lengths to achieve that self-sufficiency. Although he seemed to be a man of the left, especially after the fractious events of 1968, he was no collectivist. From the outset, he cast himself as a rugged individualist tilling the fields of American culture. He chose not to work for others, he said, because Ernest Hemingway had shown that freelancers could make it on their own. In fact, Hemingway’s wives offered him significant financial support, especially in his early years, but his perceived independence was what mattered most to Thompson. His own freelance ethic was fortified by a more practical consideration: he lost every regular job he managed to obtain.

If Thompson’s American Dream was mostly about self-sufficiency, it also had to do with a patch of land. Like Hofstadter’s yeoman, Thompson preferred to live in close communion with beneficent nature. "My only faith in this country is rooted in such places as Colorado and Idaho and maybe Big Sur as it was before the war, he noted in a 1962 letter. The cities are grease pits and not worth blowing off the map. Editors would bankroll his enthusiastic descents into urban depravity, but most of his homes were set in bucolic landscapes. In 1966, Thompson left San Francisco for Colorado and eventually occupied an abandoned ranch house ten miles outside of Aspen. He immediately wrote to Silberman: This is my first letter in the new house, new desk, new writing room, etc. . . . painted red, white, and blue by a dope freak that I hired from the trailer court." Almost three years later, Thompson described Owl Farm as his land-fortress; later still, he called it his fortified compound.

Thompson combined his version of the American Dream with a reflexive pessimism. His first-person narrator in The Rum Diary articulated that combination precisely.

Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles—a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other—that kept me going.

As was frequently the case, Thompson’s narrator spoke for him. Despite his sense of impending doom, Thompson clung tenaciously to the American Dream as he understood it.

The income from his writing sustained Thompson’s independence, and in his letter to Silberman, his immediate concern was the $5,000 installment he would receive for submitting a partial manuscript for the nonfiction book. Although he had generated hundreds of manuscript pages, he admitted that his draft was a heap of useless bullshit. He envisioned a narrative that blended fiction with straight journalistic scenes, but he was struggling with that formula and plainly hoped to scotch the project. "I loathe the fucking memory of the day when I told you I’d ‘go out and write about The Death of the American Dream,’ he told Silberman. I had no idea what you meant then, and I still don’t. The concept, he said, was too broad and pretentious to address directly. Anything he wrote, he told Silberman, was about the death of the American Dream, but that wasn’t the same as writing a book with that working title. Like many dreams, Thompson’s subject lay tantalizingly beneath or beyond consciousness. You might as well have told me to write a book about Truth and Wisdom, he complained to Silberman the previous summer. Now he was even more irate. Why in the name of stinking Jesus should I be stuck with this kind of book? Maybe later, when my legs go. Fuck the American Dream. It was always a lie & whoever still believes it deserves whatever they get—and they will. Bet on it."

Thompson’s frothing might have rattled some editors, but Silberman was a seasoned veteran. After serving in the Second World War, he graduated from Harvard and landed a position in Boston at Little, Brown and Company. By that time, the firm’s editor-in-chief was the target of a campaign led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Liberal and staunchly anti-communist, the Harvard historian was furious that Angus Cameron had passed on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the anti-Soviet fable that Schlesinger called to his attention. In 1947, Schlesinger sought a release from his own contract with Little, Brown. Four years later, Cameron was forced to resign after a right-wing organization called the publishing company a Communist front. That same year, however, Time magazine described Cameron as the nation’s foremost book editor after he published J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Schlesinger also targeted Cameron’s authors. He called one of them, Carey McWilliams, a Typhoid Mary of the left; he and his friends weren’t Communists, Schlesinger wrote in the New York Post, but they carried the disease. It was an unworthy dig against an accomplished author and editor. In 1929, McWilliams published his first book, a biography of Ambrose Bierce, after H. L. Mencken mentioned the need for a good one. At the time, McWilliams was a 24-year-old Los Angeles lawyer and Mencken acolyte. The Great Depression radicalized McWilliams, and his history of California farm labor, Factories in the Field (1939), became a bestseller. He wrote eight more books, including five for Cameron, over the next eleven years. They focused on racial and ethnic discrimination, the Japanese evacuation and internment, and the dangers of rabid anti-communism. Decades later, Schlesinger conceded that McWilliams’s books were first-rate, but he maintained that The Nation magazine, which McWilliams edited, was insufficiently critical of the Soviet Union. McWilliams deflected the attack and eventually led The Nation, founded by abolitionists in 1865, through its most difficult decade. As the magazine celebrated its centennial, McWilliams offered Thompson the Hell’s Angels assignment.

By the time Thompson’s article appeared, Silberman had moved to New York City, worked his way up to executive editor at Dial Press, and switched to Random House. There he rejoined Cameron, who had been blacklisted before Knopf, a division of Random House, offered him an editorial position. In 1960, Cameron passed on Thompson’s novel, Prince Jellyfish, but Thompson was grateful that Cameron offered helpful criticism instead of a canned rejection letter. Shortly after signing a contract with Ballantine for the Hell’s Angels book, Thompson wrote to Cameron that he wanted to get this cycle book out of the way and return to his novel, The Rum Diary. He also mentioned his reasons for identifying himself primarily as a novelist. Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t reach, he told Cameron. "Facts are lies when they’re added up, and the only kind of journalism I can pay much attention to is something like Down and Out in Paris and London." Now classified as fiction, not journalism, Orwell’s classic is so autobiographical that it is frequently considered a memoir. For Orwell as well as Thompson, the lines between participatory journalism, autobiography, and fiction were vanishingly thin.

Midway through his already lengthy letter to Silberman, Thompson paused to review the galleys of a forthcoming article. Playboy magazine had rejected his profile of Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy, but Warren Hinckle quickly agreed to run it in the premiere issue of Scanlan’s Monthly. Thompson had met Hinckle in San Francisco, where he presided over Ramparts magazine. After running blockbuster stories on Vietnam and other topics, Ramparts’s circulation soared, but the magazine was never solvent, and Hinckle resigned when it filed for bankruptcy in 1969. He quickly cofounded Scanlan’s, where he hoped to reproduce his editorial success. "God only knows what kind of magazine he has in mind, Thompson told Silberman, but if he can drum up anything like the old, high-flying Ramparts, I know I look forward to reading it." After reviewing the galleys of his article, however, Thompson denounced the Scanlan’s crew. The swine have lopped off the whole end of my original ms.—about 25 pages of high white prose that I thought was the best part, Thompson wrote. Goddamn the tasteless pigs.

For all his venting, Thompson knew he had to produce more than rambling letters. Returning to the problem at hand, he outlined several options to Silberman. One was the Pump House Gang approach. Like Tom Wolfe, Thompson could collect his magazine pieces and publish them as a book. Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, which Douglas Brinkley described as Thompson’s Bible, was a variation on this theme. Thompson admired both authors, but he didn’t think his articles would come together as a book. By this time, too, Mailer had also written The Armies of the Night (1968). In that book, he used his personal experience as the basis for the novel, whose protagonist was also named Mailer. The plan worked: The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Maybe Thompson could follow Mailer’s lead. More than anything, he wanted to be a novelist. But where to start?

Thompson was also pondering Frederick Exley’s novel, A Fan’s Notes. Like Mailer’s book, it appeared in 1968 and was profoundly self-referential. Its narrator is named Frederick Exley, and the world reveals its meaning through his warped consciousness. Suffering from alcoholism, madness, and an obsession with professional football, the protagonist presents himself as an intelligent loser coping unsuccessfully with that long malaise, my life. For Thompson, Exley’s narrative technique fell somewhere between Wolfe’s and Mailer’s. He didn’t consider Exley a great writer, nor did he wish to make his acquaintance, but he credited the book’s demented kind of honesty.

Like Mailer and Exley, Thompson planned to create a fictional character to focalize his narrative. That way, he explained to Silberman, he could use the 1968 Democratic National Convention or President Nixon’s inauguration as a framework for the trials and tribulations of my protagonist, Raoul Duke. As he wrote to Silberman in a different letter, his goal was "to let me sit back and play reasonable, while he freaks out. Or maybe those roles should be reversed . . .?" The problem lay in the execution. He could not make Duke come to life, and the American Dream motif was a burden. In an aside, he reminded Silberman that F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to call his book about Jay Gatsby The Death of the Red White and Blue. Even while probing his manuscript’s most intractable problem, Thompson linked himself to another literary hero. He considered The Great Gatsby the most American novel of all and occasionally typed out passages to see how they felt. He also cribbed Fitzgerald’s phrase the high white note to describe his own style at its best.

With a head full of literary voices, Thompson could not solve the riddle of the second book. He closed his seventeen-page letter by exhorting Silberman to furnish a remedy. "Hell, you’re an editor and you’re paid to solve this kind of nightmare puzzle, he wrote. I’ll expect a finely reasoned answer very soon." It was a dispiriting conclusion, especially after years of fruitless effort.

Thompson did not know that a solution would appear within months. The inspiration came over dinner with novelist James Salter, who moved to Aspen shortly after Thompson. Salter’s third book, A Sport and a Pastime, was a stylish erotic novel set in provincial France, where Salter had been stationed during the Berlin crisis. Like much of Thompson’s favorite literature, A Sport and a Pastime used first-person narration and blurred the lines between fact and fantasy. Published by George Plimpton at the Paris Review Press, it did not sell well, but Salter was flush anyway; he had written screenplays for three films released in 1969, including Downhill Racer with Robert Redford.

Dinner parties at Salter’s house didn’t resemble the high spirits at Owl Farm. The novelist and his wife preferred small gatherings, and on this evening, the Thompsons were the only guests. Having learned that Thompson was from Louisville, Salter asked whether he was planning to cover the Kentucky Derby, which was scheduled for early May. Thompson immediately contacted a receptive Hinckle. He paired Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman, who was staying with friends on Long Island. Thompson and Steadman met in Louisville and attended the race, which Dust Commander won by five lengths. But Thompson cared nothing about the outcome, focusing instead on the drunken revelry that accompanied the event. Written mostly in the first person, the piece had an edgy tone that was its dominant feature.

After filing the article, Thompson was concerned. "This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer, he told Steadman. I have no story. Later, he confided that the piece was useless, aside from