Hunter S. Thompson Books In Order

Fear and Loathing Books In Publication Order

  1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
  2. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)
  3. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (2009)

Fear and Loathing Letters Books In Publication Order

  1. The Proud Highway (1997)
  2. Fear and Loathing in America (2000)
  3. The Mutineer (2012)

Gonzo Papers Books In Publication Order

  1. The Great Shark Hunt (1979)
  2. Generation of Swine (1988)
  3. Songs of the Doomed (1990)
  4. Better Than Sex (1994)
  5. The Gonzo Papers Anthology (2007)
  6. Gonzo: An Oral History (2007)
  7. Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (With: ) (2009)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Rum Diary (1998)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Screwjack (2000)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Hell’s Angels (1966)
  2. The Curse of Lono (1983)
  3. Kingdom of Fear (2003)
  4. Hey Rube (2004)
  5. Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson (2005)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Exquisite Corpse Annual, No. 2, 2010 (2010)

Fear and Loathing Book Covers

Fear and Loathing Letters Book Covers

Gonzo Papers Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Hunter S. Thompson Books Overview

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson’s savagely comic account of what happened to this country in the 1960s. It is told through the writer’s account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and ‘check it out.’ The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. As Christopher Lehmann Haupt wrote in The New York Times, it has ‘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.’ This twenty fifth anniversary Modern Library edition features Ralph Steadman’s original drawings and three companion pieces selected by Dr. Thompson: ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,’ and ‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.’The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard bound editions of important works of liter ature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

The best, the fastest, the hippest and the most unorthodox account ever published of the US presidential electoral process in all its madness and corruption. In 1972 Hunter S. Thompson, the creator and king of Gonzo journalism, covered the US presidential campaign for Rolling Stone magazine alongside the establishment newsmen of Washington. The result is a classic piece of subversive reportage and a fantastic ride on the rollercoaster of Hunter’s uniquely savage imagination. In his own words, written years before Watergate: ‘It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.’

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone

The definitive collection of the king of gonzo journalism’s finest work for ROLLING STONE Buy the ticket, take the ride, was a favorite slogan of Hunter S. Thompson, and it pretty much defined both his work and his life. Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the roller coaster of a career at the magazine that was his literary home. Jann S. Wenner, the outlaw journalist s friend and editor for nearly thirty five years, has assembled articles that begin with Thompson s infamous run for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Party ticket in 1970 and end with his final piece on the Bush Kerry showdown of 2004. In between is Thompson s remarkable coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign a miracle of journalism under pressure and plenty of attention paid to Richard Nixon, his b te noire; encounters with Muhammad Ali, Bill Clinton, and the Super Bowl; and a lengthy excerpt from his acknowledged masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Woven throughout is selected correspondence between Wenner and Thompson, most of it never before published. It traces the evolution of a personal and professional relationship that helped redefine modern American journalism, and also presents Thompson through a new prism as he pursued his lifelong obsession: The life and death of the American Dream.

The Proud Highway

Before there was Gonzo, there was just plain Hunter a precocious, earnest, and occasionally troublesome honor student in Louisville, Kentucky. Before there was Doctor Thompson, there was Airman Thompson the military’s answer to Grantland Rice, protecting America by covering sports for his Florida base’s newspaper. Before there was Fear and Loathing,there was Dow Jones that is, Thompson’s early reportage for that company’s National Observer, which raised the standard for hip and provocative foreign coverage. Before there was Rolling Stone, there were job applications everywhere in hopes of being hired by a paper, pretty much any paper, an obsession for the starving writer with expensive tastes in alcohol, nicotine, and room service. In The Proud Highway, readers will find a Hunter S. Thompson they’ve imagined but never known. With the publication of these extraordinary letters, written from the time of his high school graduation in 1955 through the triumph of his first book, Hell’s Angels, in 1966, critics and fans can finally trace the development and maturation of a singular talent, one of our era’s most important voices. How Thompson changed the face of contemporary nonfiction and of America itself is the mesmerizing story of The Proud Highway.

Fear and Loathing in America

Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, Hunter S. Thompson is back with another astonishing volume of his private correspondence, the highly anticipated follow up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it ‘deliriously entertaining’; Rolling Stone called it ‘brilliant beyond description’; and The New York Times celebrated its ‘wicked humor and bracing political conviction.’

Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never before published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. To read Thompson’s dispatches from these years addressed to the author’s friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.

Provocative and revealing, Fear and Loathing in America cements Hunter S. Thompson’s reputation as one of the great literary and cultural icons of our time the only man alive to have ridden with both the Hell’s Angels and Richard Nixon.

The Mutineer

The third and final collection of literary legend Hunter S. Thompson’s previously unpublished letters bears witness to his final years 1976 2005.

The Great Shark Hunt

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling ‘Gonzo Papers’ is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed ‘gonzo’ ‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,’ which appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970. From this essay a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson’s razor sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful ’60s and ’70s.

Generation of Swine

‘Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like ‘certain death’ and ‘total failure’ and the idea of ‘a doomed generation’. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes’. Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, has been writing a weekly column for the ‘San Francisco Examiner’ for the last two years. Those columns are collected here to offer a chronicle of the adventures of a Generation of Swine. The incomparable ‘Dr Gonzo’ has journeyed no small distance in search of intelligent life and reports back, instead, on the demented state of current events. He keeps tabs on the 1998 presidential race, quotes from the Bible reference books in hotel rooms are supplied exclusively by the Gideons and asks why the President appears to be a hundred and twenty eight years old. ‘He is working from a dementia that no one in his right mind would want to share. It is the dementia, however, that makes Thompson great’ ‘Playboy’. ‘His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest’ Nelson Algren.

Songs of the Doomed

‘I was thinking; my mind was running at top speed, scanning and sorting my options. They ranged all the way from Dumb and Dangerous to Crazy, Evil, and utterly wrong from the start…
stand back. We are on the brink. Yes. I have an idea’. When Hunter S. Thompson has an idea, you just have to listen and he shares many of his unique ideas in this collection of journalism, social commentary, short fiction and autobiography. Divided into sections by decade, ‘Songs of the Doomed‘ begins with a furious condemnation of the US justice system and ends with the author’s own version of the events that led to his extraordinary court case. Stopping off at the infamous summit conference in Elko, Illinois; Saigon in 1975 the war zone Thompson was fired while en route to; and, Palm Beach in the eighties for the Pulitzer divorce, here in true Gonzo fashion is the long strange trip from Kennedy to Nixon to Quayle. ‘Mr Thompson’s best work of the past three decades’ ‘New York Times Book Review’. ‘There are many hideously funny stories in this collection. Thompson writing on mescalin, staying on for the fall of Saigon, explaining what it must be like to be a multimillionaire in Palm Beach…
‘ ‘Independent on Sunday’. ‘Dead funny…
That our guru has made it this far merits drinks and dynamite all round at the Woody Creek Road and Gun Club and spiritually affiliated North London branches. That he is still alive, and at large, defies medical and legal beliefs’ Andy Kershaw, ‘Literary Review’. ‘Proves that you can’t keep the old bast*ard quiet…
a superb offering’ ‘City Limits’.

Better Than Sex

‘Hunter S. Thompson is to drug addled, stream of consciousness, psycho political black humor what Forrest Gump is to idiot savants.’ The Philadelphia InquirerSince his 1972 trailblazing opus, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson has reported the election story in his truly inimitable, just short of libel style. In Better Than Sex, Thompson hits the dusty trail again without leaving home yet manages to deliver a mind bending view of the 1992 presidential campaign in all of its horror, sacrifice, lust, and dubious glory. Complete with faxes sent to and received by candidate Clinton’s top aides, and 100 percent pure gonzo screeds on Richard Nixon, George Bush, and Oliver North, here is the most true blue campaign tell all ever penned by man or beast.’ Thompson delivers yet another of his trademark cocktail mixes of unbelievable tales and dark observations about the sausage grind that is the U.S. presidential sweepstakes. Packed with egocentric anecdotes, musings and reprints of memos, faxes and scrawled handwritten notes Memorable.’ Los Angeles Daily News’What endears Hunter Thompson to anyone who reads him is that he will say what others are afraid to . He is a master at the unlikely but invariably telling line that sums up a political figure . In a year when all politics is to much of the public a tendentious and pompous bore, it is time to read Hunter Thompson.’ Richmond Times Dispatch’While Tom Wolfe mastered the technique of being a fly on the wall, Thompson mastered the art of being a fly in the ointment. He made himself a part of every story, made no apologies for it and thus produced far more honest reporting than any crusading member of the Fourth Estate . Thompson isn’t afraid to take the hard medicine, nor is he bashful about dishing it out . He is still king of beasts, and his apocalyptic prophecies seldom miss their target.’ Tulsa World’This is a very, very funny book. No one can ever match Thompson in the vitriol department, and virtually nobody escapes his wrath.’ The Flint Journal

The Gonzo Papers Anthology

Hunter S. Thompson was the creator of a new kind of journalism and invented a new style of writing. ‘Gonzo’ was a wild, often drug and drink fuelled adventure, in which Thompson examined the politics, people, and values of his times. In the three great collections of ‘Gonzo’ writings, ‘The Great Shark Hunt’, ‘Generation of Swine’, and ‘Songs of the Doomed’ he dissected the 60s, 70s, and 80s with violence, wit, anger, and occasional compassion. Collected together for the first time, ‘The Gonzo Papers Anthology‘ is an indispensable compendium of decadence, depravity, and a remarkably skewed common sense. ‘Hunter Thompson elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral’ William F. Buckley. ‘No other reporter reveals how much we have to fear and loathe, yet does it so hilariously’ Nelson Algren.

Gonzo: An Oral History

Gonzo is a tour de force that will take you into the world of American writer and iconoclast Hunter S. Thompson.

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (With: )

Bristling with inspired observations and wild anecdotes, this collection offers unique insight into the voice and mind of the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson, as recorded over the decades in the pages of ‘Playboy’, the ‘Paris Review’, ‘Esquire’, in various lectures, and in television appearances, many in print for the first time. Fearless and unsparing, the interviews detail some of the most storied episodes of Thompson’s life: his savage beating at the hands of the Hell’s Angels, his talking football with Nixon on the 1972 Campaign Trail ‘the only time in twenty years of listening to the treacherous bast*ard that I knew he wasn’t lying’; his razor sharp insight into the Bush Cheney administration, his unlikely run for Sheriff of Aspen, and his successful public battle, during the last years of his life, to free an innocent woman from prison. In addition, Hunter Thompson’s passionate tirades about journalism, culture, drugs, guns, and the law showcase his singular voice at its fiercest. Complete with an exclusive introduction by author, journalist, and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens, ‘Ancient Gonzo Wisdom’ genuinely embraces the brilliance of Hunter S. Thompson his life, his voice, and his legacy to provide an enduring portrait of the great gonzo journalist. ‘Four years after his death, the rapid fire wit and venom of Thompson’s writing is undiminished. ‘Ancient Gonzo Wisdom’ features classic HST interviews’ ‘GQ’.

The Rum Diary

The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by then twenty two year old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel, and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would ‘in a twisted way…
do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises did for Paris.’ In Paul Kemp, the novel’s hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the ‘ill tempered wandering rabble’ on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. ‘I shared a dark suspicion,’ Kemp says, ‘that the life we were leading was a lost cause, 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.’ The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. ‘It was a gold rush,’ says the author. ‘There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit.’ Puerto Rico was an unspoiled tropical paradise in those years before Castro, before JFK, before civil rights & moonwalks & flower power & Vietnam & protests & even before drugs but the San Juan Daily News was a vortex & a snakepit of all the corrupt new schemes & plots & greedmongers who swarmed in. Paul Kemp, The Rum Diary‘s narrator, speaks for the unfocused angst of those times: ‘In a sense I was one of them more competent than some and more stable than others and in the years that carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys, I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way.’

Screwjack

Hunter S. Thompson’s legions of fans have waited a decade for this book. They will not be disappointed. His notorious Screwjack is as salacious, unsettling, and brutally lyrical as it has been rumored to be since the private printing in 1991 of three hundred fine collectors’ copies and twenty six leather bound presentation copies. Only the first of the three pieces included here ‘Mescalito,’ published in Thompson’s 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed has been available to the public, making the trade edition of Screwjack a major publishing event. ‘We live in a jungle of pending disasters,’ Thompson warns in ‘Mescalito,’ a chronicle of his first mescaline experience and what it sparked in him while he was alone in an L.A. hotel room in February 1969 including a bout of paranoia that would have made most people just scream no, once and for all. But for Thompson, along with the downside came a burst of creativity too powerful to ignore. The result is a poetic, perceptive, and wildly funny stream of consciousness take on 1969 America as only Hunter S. Thompson could see it. Screwjack just gets weirder with its second offering, ‘Death of a Poet.’ As Thompson describes this trailer park confrontation with the dark side of a deservingly doomed friend: ‘Whoops, I thought. Welcome to the night train.’ The heart of the collection lies in its final, title piece, an unnaturally poignant love story. What makes the romantic tale ‘Screwjack‘ so touching, for all its queerness, is the aching melancholy in its depiction of the modern man’s burden: that ‘we are doomed. Mama has gone off to Real Estate School…
and after that maybe even to Law School. We will never see her again.’ Ostensibly written by Raoul Duke, ‘Screwjack‘ begins with an editor’s note explaining of Thompson’s alter ego that ‘the first few lines contain no warning of the madness and fear and lust that came more and more to plague him and dominate his life…
.’ ‘I am guilty, Lord,’ Thompson writes, ‘but I am also a lover and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you…
.’ Nor has Hunter S. Thompson been to American literature. Quite the contrary: What the legendary Gonzo journalist proves with Screwjack is just how brilliant a prose stylist he really is, amid all the hilarity. As Thompson puts it in his introduction, the three stories here ‘build like Bolero to a faster & wilder climax that will drag the reader relentlessly up a hill, & then drop him off a cliff…
. That is the Desired Effect’.

Hell’s Angels

‘California, Labor Day weekend…
early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all night diners and cast off one night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur…
The Menace is loose again.’ Thus begins Hunter S. Thompson’s vivid account of his experiences with California’s most no torious motorcycle gang, the Hell’s Angels. In the mid 1960s, Thompson spent almost two years living with the controversial An gels, cycling up and down the coast, reveling in the anarchic spirit of their clan, and, as befits their name, raising hell. His book successfully captures a singular moment in American history, when the biker lifestyle was first defined, and when such countercultural movements were electrifying and horrifying America. Thompson, the creator of Gonzo journalism, writes with his usual bravado, energy, and brutal honesty, and with a nuanced and incisive eye; as The New Yorker pointed out, ‘For all its uninhibited and sardonic humor, Thompson’s book is a thoughtful piece of work.’ As illuminating now as when originally published in 1967, Hell’s Angels is a gripping portrait, and the best account we have of the truth behind an American legend. From the Hardcover edition.

The Curse of Lono

Hunter S. Thompson’s most eccentric book in a new, limited edition…

The Curse of Lono is to Hawaii what Fear and Loathing was to Las Vegas: the crazy tales of a journalist s ‘coverage’ of a news event that ends up being a wild ride to the dark side of Americana. Originally published in 1983, Curse features all of the zany, hallucinogenic wordplay and feral artwork for which the Hunter S. Thompson/Ralph Steadman duo have become known and loved. This curious book, considered an oddity among Hunter s oeuvre, has been long out of print, prompting collectors to search high and low for an original copy.

Kingdom of Fear

Brilliant, provocative, outrageous, and brazen, Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous rule breaking in his journalism, in his life, and under the law changed the shape of American letters, and the face of American icons. ‘Kingdom of Fear‘ traces the course of Thompson’s life as a rebel from a smart mouthed Kentucky kid flaunting all authority to a convention defying journalist who came to personify a wild fusion of fact, fiction, and mind altering substances. Call it the evolution of an outlaw. Here are the formative experiences that comprise Thompson’s legendary trajectory alongside the weird and the ugly. Whether detailing his exploits as a foreign correspondent in Rio, his job as night manager of the notorious O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, his epic run for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, or the sensational legal maneuvering that led to his full acquittal in the famous 99 Days trial, Thompson is at the peak of his narrative powers in ‘Kingdom of Fear.’ And this boisterous, blistering ride illuminates as never before the professional and ideological risk taking of a literary genius and transgressive icon.

Hey Rube

SPORTS, POLITICS, AND SEX COLLIDE IN HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S WILDLY POPULAR ESPN. COM COLUMNS. Insightful, incendiary, outrageously brilliant, such was the man who galvanized American journalism with his radical ideas and gonzo tactics. For over half a century, Hunter S. Thompson devastated his readers with his acerbic wit and uncanny grasp of politics and history. His reign as ‘The Unabomber of contemporary letters’ Time is more legendary than ever with Hey Rube. Fear, greed, and action abound in this hilarious, thought provoking compilation as Thompson doles out searing indictments and uproarious rants while providing commentary on politics, sex, and sports at times all in the same column. With an enlightening foreword by ESPN executive editor John Walsh, critics’ favorites, and never before published columns, Hey Rube follows Thompson through the beginning of the new century, revealing his queasiness over the 2000 election ‘rigged and fixed from the start’; his take on professional sports to improve Major League Baseball ‘eliminate the pitcher’; and his myriad controversial opinions and brutally honest observations on issues plaguing America including the Bush administration and the inequities within the American judicial system. Hey Rube gives us a lasting look at the gonzo journalist in his most organic form unbridled, astute, and irreverent.

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