Hunter S. Thompson, Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die
Hunter S. Thompson's journalistic prose-poem Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas used a lost weekend in Las Vegas as a metaphor for America's season in hell, also known as drug induced generational destiny that was the 1960's. Thompson, called in by a national magazine to cover a cross-country motorcycle race, Thompson filed a postmortem on the 60's counterculture while reporting on his brain as though it were the dark side of the moon. Like a belated sequal to Hells Angels (Another book written by Thompson) Fear and Loathing opens with two guys in Hawaiian shirts and a red convertable bombing, born to be wild, towards Nevada's neon abyss. "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" (Thompson 1) This is the line with which both the book and the movie begin. The search for the American dream will be three days in Vegas. Thompson's work not only has the guts to dramatize the writer's flashback to San Francisco, 1965, but also includes his opinion on the moment's drug induced sense of generational destiny. Despite the world famous title, Fear and Loathing was deeply unfashionable when it was released. As a writer, Thompson is remembered most for his flamboyant and humorous style, with comically spun tales that were completely unbelievable to ordinary suburban folk. He provided a unique viewpoint to accurately describe the underlying reality at hand. Thompson almost always wrote in first person narrative, and his stories became so colorfully contrived that they easily slipped into the realm of fiction; however, the basic framework of the story he told was often true. Thompson's writing style has been widely imitated; his influence on American writers of the latter half of the 20th century is undeniable. In his writing, he cultivated the persona of a dangerously absurd, drug-crazed journalits bent on comic self-destruction. This character is named Raoul Duke, and while Thompson's fictional persona largely