True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. No alterations in the dark-room, no cutting or cropping, no spotting…no editing. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive – but once the image was written, the words would be final in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication – without editing. This is getting pretty heavy… so I should cut back and explain, at some point, the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily ‘more true’ than Journalism – or vice versa – but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. It is a style of ‘reporting’ based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than journalism – and the best journalists have always known this. to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.” – Tom Wolfe, on New Journalsimīut Thompson has said he cannot remember what parts of Fear and Loathing he made up and what was reality. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds of simultaneously, or within a relatively short space. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. “It showed me the possibility of there being something ‘new’ in journalism. But the difference between Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing is something more than “intertwined.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has become a road map to several generations, regardless of whether their focus was on the taking drugs, journalism, or just to challenge the status quo. Thompson would later say that Gonzo was not so much separate from New Journalism, but that it was more “intertwined” with it. Fear and Loathing takes New Journalism to a new realm - to Gonzo Journalism. Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels, is a classic example of New Journalism’s use of first person to construct a narrative. Targets are numerous in this scathing portrait of both Bugsy Siegel’s desert dream-town and America on the whole. So, while the middle sixties were a time of hope and dreams, by the early seventies, the dream had been lost. History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.
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“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be part of. And while it is not my favorite Thompson book, it is probably his most important. For many, it is the book that defines Thompson.
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Thompson’s fantasia on the America dream – setting out to “reaffirm Horatio Alger,” or so Thompson said.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS OPENING LINE SERIES
First published as a series of essays in Rolling Stone in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” For a certain population this first line is one of the best known first lines in literature.