Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
- New York: Random House, 1972
New York: Random House, 1972. First edition. Near Fine/Near Fine. Publisher's blindstamped gray boards. Some fading to top edge of boards and some foxing to top edge of closed text block, but clean and unmarked internally. Dust jacket with a just a bit of toning to top edge of front panel. Bookseller's ticket to lower pastedown. An attractive copy overall. Thompson's account was originally published in Rolling Stone in November 1971. Publication in book form followed in 1972, in dust jackets dated "6/72" on the rear flap (as here).
The crackling and infamous roman à clef, a masterpiece of gonzo journalism from the man Tom Wolfe called “the twentieth century’s greatest comic writer in English.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on the experiences Thompson had travelling with activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. Thompson had originally wanted to speak to Acosta as part of a story he was doing on a Mexican journalist who had been killed by the Los Angeles police department, and they had gone to Las Vegas to find a safer and less charged place to speak, away from the racial tensions of the city. The book was later adapted into the 1998 cult classic film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. "The whole book boils down to 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" (contemporary New York Times review). Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.
The crackling and infamous roman à clef, a masterpiece of gonzo journalism from the man Tom Wolfe called “the twentieth century’s greatest comic writer in English.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on the experiences Thompson had travelling with activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. Thompson had originally wanted to speak to Acosta as part of a story he was doing on a Mexican journalist who had been killed by the Los Angeles police department, and they had gone to Las Vegas to find a safer and less charged place to speak, away from the racial tensions of the city. The book was later adapted into the 1998 cult classic film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. "The whole book boils down to 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" (contemporary New York Times review). Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.