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"Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas" is a heavily impressionistic, fictionalised account of an assignment he took to cover a motorcycle race held out in Los Angeles. Thompson was going through a bad time at this point, having been also assigned to write an article covering the death of Mexican-American journalist Ruben Salazar whose head had been blown apart when the police had fired a tear gas canister into the bar where he was drinking. Thompson, being white, was not trusted by the various militant groups who were trying to make capital of the incident. Connected with these was an old friend of Thompson's - Oscar Acosta - a chicano lawyer, frightened to talk to him for fear of reprisal or, at best, loss of faith. At the same time he was feeling like a burnt out victim of the sixties, forced to hang around after the party was over and Nixon had taken charge.
The fictionalised trip to LA is an account of the actual trip made by Thompson and Acosta - who became a Samoan attorney in the book. Here was a stoned hyped up Kerouac for the sixties taking to the open road and ripping through the heart of the American dream with a post 60's beat sensibility, fueled by massive chemical intake.
What Thompson did was distill all his feelings about the current political situation, the failure of the sixties and his paranoia of being killed by militants... and it's funny as hell. Not funny satirical like Burroughs where you are usually left grasping for the joke but funny crazy, funny nasty and just plain old funny.
Despite this, Thompson's viewpoint is not a revolutionary one. He comes across as a somewhat scared, irrational, crazed, drug paranoid, preppie who survives because he is one step ahead of his discredited credit cards.
Thompson wrote the beginning of the novel in parallel with the article on Salazar, which emerged as "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan". He also claimed that he loathed writing but "Fear and Loathing" was an exception. As he said in the jacket copy.
"The only important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare - for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
Even the jacket copy for "Fear and Loathing" is surreal, especially where he describes talking pro football with Nixon (who was a fanatic).
"We both spent a long night together on the Thruway from Boston to Manchester, dissecting the pro & con strategy of the Oakland-Green Bay Super Bowl game. It was the only time I've ever seen the bugger relaxed - laughing, whacking me on the knee as he recalled Max McGee's one-handed catch for the back breaking touchdown. I was impressed. It was like talking to Owsley about Acid."
The proposed 250 word sports article became 2,500 words which were speedily and angrily rejected. Finally "Rolling Stone" took it up and the rest is history. Thompson himself thought his timing was excellent.
"Because it was nice to be loose and crazy with a good credit card in a time when it was possible to run totally wild in Las Vegas and then paid for writing a book about it…and it occurs to me that I probably just made it, just under the wire and the deadline. Nobody will dare admit this kind of behaviour if Nixon wins again in '72."
Thompson was viewing the end of the sixties, faced with the prospect of four more years of Nixon. The good times were over. Even the drugs were old hat. He was tired of the same old stuff and didn't like what the future held. Life was no fun anymore....
....After the publication of "Fear and Loathing" life became even less fun. He said that he was now famous that it would be better if he killed himself so that everyone could burnish his legend without the real item around to spoil it. Still he hung on till 2005 until his lifestyle caught up with him. He broke his leg and his health was bad so perhaps he decided it was finally time to check out before things got any worse. At any rate he blew his brains out on February 20th.
There are numerous Hunter S Thompson books in print. The thickest contain his diaries or his letters or else collections of his articles. Much of this is interesting, good even, but all diaries have their tedium and old news is old news no matter how well written. With the possible exception of "Hells Angels" it is "Fear and Loathing" that will survive. It's his "On the Road" and like Kerouac before him he spent the rest of his life living it down.