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Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo
Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Author Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.
Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.
Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.
295 pages, Hardcover
Published January 25, 2022
23 people are currently reading
1473 people want to read
About the author
Peter Richardson
6 books27 followersPeter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. He is currently completing a book about the first decade of Rolling Stone magazine.
Richardson's essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets. Excerpts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Bookforum. A busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.
From 2006 to 2023, Richardson taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. His cultural commentary has been featured in major newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad, and he has appeared in several documentary films and television programs. He is regular guest on radio programs and podcasts, and he speaks occasionally at universities, museums, book festivals, and historical societies.
Richardson's professional experience includes editorial stints at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers.
In the 1990s, Richardson was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Iceland, and an NEH Summer Seminar fellow at Harvard University. He also wrote a textbook on stylistic revision, now in its second edition. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Born and raised in the East Bay, he now lives in Sonoma County.
Richardson's essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets. Excerpts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Bookforum. A busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.
From 2006 to 2023, Richardson taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. His cultural commentary has been featured in major newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad, and he has appeared in several documentary films and television programs. He is regular guest on radio programs and podcasts, and he speaks occasionally at universities, museums, book festivals, and historical societies.
Richardson's professional experience includes editorial stints at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers.
In the 1990s, Richardson was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Iceland, and an NEH Summer Seminar fellow at Harvard University. He also wrote a textbook on stylistic revision, now in its second edition. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Born and raised in the East Bay, he now lives in Sonoma County.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 16, 2022
“I’m really in the way as a person,” Thompson said in 1978. “The myth has taken over.”
This is the second book on Hunter S. Thompson that I've recently read; the first one is David S. Wills - 'High White Notes - The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism', which focuses on how Thompson invented gonzo, his style of writing. This book is far more biographical and has pros and cons when compared with Wills's book.
Richardson has done a fine job in going through Thompson's sea of writing, easily sifting through the good and bad. The good lies mainly in how Richardson sees Thompson from a helicopter picture. The bad is that Richardson gets too deeply into subjects that he's written about previously, mainly *Ramparts* magazine and Carey McWilliams, perhaps mainly known for having edited the magazine *The Nation*.
Still, there are many nuggets found here. Richardson does not shy away from criticising Thompson on a variety of subjects, for example, racism, bad writing, and abuse (of both women and substances).
It's lovely to read on how Richardson weaves a tale of why Thompson started writing, although Wills goes deeper into Thompson's genesis.
McKeen also observed that Prince Jellyfish bore the influence of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, which its author described as “celebratory, boisterous, and resolutely careless mayhem.” Set in postwar Dublin, the comic novel depicts the daily rounds of Sebastian Dangerfield, another selfish and arrogant charmer who beats his wife and drinks away the family’s limited funds. Critics described Dangerfield variously as “impulsive, destructive, wayward, cruel, a monster, a clown, and a psychopath.” The Ginger Man was first published in 1955 by the Olympia Press, whose catalog included works by Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and William Burroughs. Donleavy’s novel appeared in the Traveller’s Companion series, which was known primarily for its erotica and banned in Ireland and the United States. (Grove Press reissued the novel, which eventually sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.) Donleavy was furious that the novel was mistaken for smut, but its transgressive status probably heightened the appeal for Thompson. Reading The Ginger Man, Thompson said later, “made up my mind that I had to be a writer.”
There are some interesting comparisons made between Jack London and Thompson.
Like Thompson, London believed that fiction was more truthful than mere fact. “I have been forced to conclude that Fact, to be true, must imitate Fiction,” London wrote. “The creative imagination is more veracious than the voice of life.”
I like Richardson's writing style: at times, stringent, other times, relaxed:
Hunter was absolutely obsessed with the Senate hearings and Robert Kennedy. It was the only damn thing he would write about in that period. He was fascinated with all that shit. He really liked the job Bobby Kennedy was doing, and he stopped writing about sports altogether.
All in all, this is a pleasant read about a groundbreaking, unpleasant, mercurial, and weird person whose best qualities left a magnificent dent in not only American writing but everywhere. Thompson appears to have been like a caged lion: magnificent to look at from afar but lethal up-close.
March 21, 2022
The following review appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books.
By Daniel de Visé
In his new book, author Peter Richardson argues that Hunter S. Thompson was “the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.”
That’s a tough sell. Thompson wrote three classic books and enough superlative magazine pieces to establish Rolling Stone as a top-shelf publication. But he flamed out before 40, hobbled by drugs and drink and decadence. “Less than a decade after his arrival on the national stage,” Richardson concedes, Thompson “found it difficult to produce a sustained piece of writing without heroic (and largely unacknowledged) assistance from his colleagues.”
Thompson’s real legacy is his persona: bucket hat, aviator sunglasses, cigarette holder, Hawaiian shirt, dilated pupils. Just as Thompson blurred journalism and fiction, the writer himself is hard to distinguish from his alter ego, Raoul Duke, the partly fictionalized, grossly exaggerated acid pirate whom Thompson posits as his surrogate in his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971. Garry Trudeau named a Doonesbury character Uncle Duke; the New Journalism movement yielded no more memorable character.
In Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo, Richardson traces the evolution of Thompson the writer, from his penniless days writing for leering men’s magazines to his reign at Rolling Stone a decade later. Some call Thompson the founder of “gonzo,” a subset of New Journalism that shed objectivity and thrust the writer to the center of the story. As Richardson explains, the truth is more complex.
Thompson is the only real icon of gonzo, a subgenre all his own. He occupied the lunatic fringe of a movement that never sat neatly within the boundaries of fiction or nonfiction. Thompson took his cue from a generation of journalistic novelists: the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer, the Ernest Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises, and the Jack Kerouac of On the Road.
Thompson’s best work wasn’t entirely journalism, let alone New Journalism. His breakthrough book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967), hews close to journalistic fact. Fear and Loathing, by contrast, bubbles over with phantasmagoric visions. His last great full-length work, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973), falls somewhere in between. One observer called it the “least factual, most accurate” account of Nixon’s reelection.
Is Thompson the most distinctive voice among the greats of New Journalism? Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, was surely a better reporter. Joan Didion, of Slouching Towards Bethlehem fame, was probably a greater thinker. And Norman Mailer, who won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for The Armies of the Night, was the more skillful writer.
But none of them tracked the slow rot of American civilization quite like Thompson. Fear and Loathing portrays a real-life Americana more harrowing than any Ralph Steadman acid nightmare. Campaign Trail ‘72 revealed the leader of the free world and most of his political rivals as fundamentally dishonest and craven — if not soulless, if not monstrous.
Thompson shaped his literary voice early on: distinctly Southern, literate, darkly humorous, biting, and not infrequently violent. He acted the part of a Major Writer long before the world had embraced him as one. He wrote condescending letters to Norman Mailer at a time when Thompson was unknown, and Mailer was famous. He called Washington Post publisher Phil Graham a “phony.”
The drink and drugs already held sway when Thompson finished his first great book, Hell’s Angels, the latter half of which he claimed to have written in four days, fueled by McDonald’s, Wild Turkey, and speed. Critics hailed him like a war correspondent for embedding with the biker gang, whose leader countered that he had found Thompson “a stone fucking coward.”
By decade’s end, Thompson had constructed a public character as vivid and vain as Didion’s — he the drug-inhaling, gun-waving, authority-bucking Aspen liberal; she the birdlike, hippie-eschewing, Goldwater-loving Sacramento conservative. Unlike Didion, however, Thompson often terrified his editors. When a friend disparaged a country song Thompson liked, Thompson pulled out his .44 Magnum, pointed it at the man’s chest, and pulled the trigger, firing a blank whose force knocked him across the room. Thompson once nearly drowned Bill Murray in a pool.
Richardson recounts Thompson’s legendary Kentucky Derby assignment, which yielded one of his greatest pieces, in loving detail. Steadman, the illustrator who became Thompson’s greatest collaborator, left his ink in a taxi and substituted lipstick borrowed from someone’s wife, a gaffe that seeded the birth of gonzo art. The Derby played out one day after the Kent State massacre, an episode for which most Americans blamed the victims.
By the end of the Kentucky assignment, a parade of excess had reduced Thompson to “a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature.” In this transformation, Richardson sees “a synecdoche for the Ugly America that decimates Southeast Asia, murders students who protest that crime, and then blames the students for their own deaths.” In “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson eulogized the American Dream.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began as a 250-word assignment for Sports Illustrated. Thompson filed 2,500 words, and SI rejected them. So, he went to Rolling Stone. Remarkably, Thompson did not immediately grasp that his Gonzo persona would become his greatest asset. He submitted the Las Vegas manuscript fearing “the permanent destruction of my credibility.”
The resulting book was about as factual as Naked Lunch, the semiautobiographical William Burroughs novel. By the time of Campaign Trail ‘72, Thompson had retreated from acid-hued impressionism to a uniquely savage brand of journalism.
What sets his book apart from the politer prose of Theodore H. White is Thompson’s mockingly subjective voice: He felt that objective journalism “was failing to meet the moment,” Richardson writes. “You had to get subjective to see Nixon clearly,” Thompson wrote, “and the shock of recognition was often painful.” And Thompson doesn’t stop with Nixon. No other campaign correspondent would have described Ed Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner, as “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”
After 1973, Thompson couldn’t enter a room without attracting a crowd. Like Sacha Baron Cohen, Uncle Duke reached a point where he could “no longer stand in the back of a room and observe,” Richardson writes. “His public persona also invited constant temptation.” Like John Belushi, Thompson couldn’t leave a room without someone offering him drugs.
The crowning irony of Thompson’s career is that much of the world still regards him as a New Journalist. Thompson saw himself as a writer, period, like Hemingway and Kerouac and Burroughs. His main character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was fictional, a decision Thompson took precisely to prevent the “grey little cocksuckers who run things” from “drawing that line between Journalism and Fiction.”
And yet, they did. “Bookstores continue to stock that book in nonfiction or journalism,” Richardson writes. College professors still teach Thompson in journalism classes.
Someone close to Thompson told me recently that she never reads books about him because they are largely populated with “people making up theories” about someone they barely knew. Savage Journey wisely focuses on the man’s work, which speaks for itself. It’s a good read.
Daniel de Visé is the author, most recently, of King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King.
By Daniel de Visé
In his new book, author Peter Richardson argues that Hunter S. Thompson was “the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.”
That’s a tough sell. Thompson wrote three classic books and enough superlative magazine pieces to establish Rolling Stone as a top-shelf publication. But he flamed out before 40, hobbled by drugs and drink and decadence. “Less than a decade after his arrival on the national stage,” Richardson concedes, Thompson “found it difficult to produce a sustained piece of writing without heroic (and largely unacknowledged) assistance from his colleagues.”
Thompson’s real legacy is his persona: bucket hat, aviator sunglasses, cigarette holder, Hawaiian shirt, dilated pupils. Just as Thompson blurred journalism and fiction, the writer himself is hard to distinguish from his alter ego, Raoul Duke, the partly fictionalized, grossly exaggerated acid pirate whom Thompson posits as his surrogate in his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971. Garry Trudeau named a Doonesbury character Uncle Duke; the New Journalism movement yielded no more memorable character.
In Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo, Richardson traces the evolution of Thompson the writer, from his penniless days writing for leering men’s magazines to his reign at Rolling Stone a decade later. Some call Thompson the founder of “gonzo,” a subset of New Journalism that shed objectivity and thrust the writer to the center of the story. As Richardson explains, the truth is more complex.
Thompson is the only real icon of gonzo, a subgenre all his own. He occupied the lunatic fringe of a movement that never sat neatly within the boundaries of fiction or nonfiction. Thompson took his cue from a generation of journalistic novelists: the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer, the Ernest Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises, and the Jack Kerouac of On the Road.
Thompson’s best work wasn’t entirely journalism, let alone New Journalism. His breakthrough book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967), hews close to journalistic fact. Fear and Loathing, by contrast, bubbles over with phantasmagoric visions. His last great full-length work, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973), falls somewhere in between. One observer called it the “least factual, most accurate” account of Nixon’s reelection.
Is Thompson the most distinctive voice among the greats of New Journalism? Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, was surely a better reporter. Joan Didion, of Slouching Towards Bethlehem fame, was probably a greater thinker. And Norman Mailer, who won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for The Armies of the Night, was the more skillful writer.
But none of them tracked the slow rot of American civilization quite like Thompson. Fear and Loathing portrays a real-life Americana more harrowing than any Ralph Steadman acid nightmare. Campaign Trail ‘72 revealed the leader of the free world and most of his political rivals as fundamentally dishonest and craven — if not soulless, if not monstrous.
Thompson shaped his literary voice early on: distinctly Southern, literate, darkly humorous, biting, and not infrequently violent. He acted the part of a Major Writer long before the world had embraced him as one. He wrote condescending letters to Norman Mailer at a time when Thompson was unknown, and Mailer was famous. He called Washington Post publisher Phil Graham a “phony.”
The drink and drugs already held sway when Thompson finished his first great book, Hell’s Angels, the latter half of which he claimed to have written in four days, fueled by McDonald’s, Wild Turkey, and speed. Critics hailed him like a war correspondent for embedding with the biker gang, whose leader countered that he had found Thompson “a stone fucking coward.”
By decade’s end, Thompson had constructed a public character as vivid and vain as Didion’s — he the drug-inhaling, gun-waving, authority-bucking Aspen liberal; she the birdlike, hippie-eschewing, Goldwater-loving Sacramento conservative. Unlike Didion, however, Thompson often terrified his editors. When a friend disparaged a country song Thompson liked, Thompson pulled out his .44 Magnum, pointed it at the man’s chest, and pulled the trigger, firing a blank whose force knocked him across the room. Thompson once nearly drowned Bill Murray in a pool.
Richardson recounts Thompson’s legendary Kentucky Derby assignment, which yielded one of his greatest pieces, in loving detail. Steadman, the illustrator who became Thompson’s greatest collaborator, left his ink in a taxi and substituted lipstick borrowed from someone’s wife, a gaffe that seeded the birth of gonzo art. The Derby played out one day after the Kent State massacre, an episode for which most Americans blamed the victims.
By the end of the Kentucky assignment, a parade of excess had reduced Thompson to “a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature.” In this transformation, Richardson sees “a synecdoche for the Ugly America that decimates Southeast Asia, murders students who protest that crime, and then blames the students for their own deaths.” In “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Thompson eulogized the American Dream.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began as a 250-word assignment for Sports Illustrated. Thompson filed 2,500 words, and SI rejected them. So, he went to Rolling Stone. Remarkably, Thompson did not immediately grasp that his Gonzo persona would become his greatest asset. He submitted the Las Vegas manuscript fearing “the permanent destruction of my credibility.”
The resulting book was about as factual as Naked Lunch, the semiautobiographical William Burroughs novel. By the time of Campaign Trail ‘72, Thompson had retreated from acid-hued impressionism to a uniquely savage brand of journalism.
What sets his book apart from the politer prose of Theodore H. White is Thompson’s mockingly subjective voice: He felt that objective journalism “was failing to meet the moment,” Richardson writes. “You had to get subjective to see Nixon clearly,” Thompson wrote, “and the shock of recognition was often painful.” And Thompson doesn’t stop with Nixon. No other campaign correspondent would have described Ed Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner, as “a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.”
After 1973, Thompson couldn’t enter a room without attracting a crowd. Like Sacha Baron Cohen, Uncle Duke reached a point where he could “no longer stand in the back of a room and observe,” Richardson writes. “His public persona also invited constant temptation.” Like John Belushi, Thompson couldn’t leave a room without someone offering him drugs.
The crowning irony of Thompson’s career is that much of the world still regards him as a New Journalist. Thompson saw himself as a writer, period, like Hemingway and Kerouac and Burroughs. His main character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was fictional, a decision Thompson took precisely to prevent the “grey little cocksuckers who run things” from “drawing that line between Journalism and Fiction.”
And yet, they did. “Bookstores continue to stock that book in nonfiction or journalism,” Richardson writes. College professors still teach Thompson in journalism classes.
Someone close to Thompson told me recently that she never reads books about him because they are largely populated with “people making up theories” about someone they barely knew. Savage Journey wisely focuses on the man’s work, which speaks for itself. It’s a good read.
Daniel de Visé is the author, most recently, of King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King.
January 25, 2022
Excellent deconstruction separating the myth of "Hunter'' and his public persona from Hunter S. Thompson's remarkable literary output. My interview with Peter Richardson about the book is linked below:
https://nobhillgazette.com/literature...
https://nobhillgazette.com/literature...
October 14, 2022
One of the better overviews of the good doctors work, short enough to be interesting, but detailed enough to be worth reading if you've already read a few of these.
In some ways this is better than High White Notes because it gets to the point. There's no needless lingering over the obvious downward spiral of the later decades.
This is definitely worth a read if you're a Hunter Thompson fan.
In some ways this is better than High White Notes because it gets to the point. There's no needless lingering over the obvious downward spiral of the later decades.
This is definitely worth a read if you're a Hunter Thompson fan.
March 20, 2022
Solid biography of Thompson’s arc and evolution as a writer.
October 1, 2025
Many interesting insights here, some of which I already knew from reading a lot of HST's early work and correspondence - but also some that was news to me. The most significant, but not surprising fact: unlike a lot of writers who arrange for the donation of their papers to universities and libraries, most of Thompson's are locked in a storage facility and controlled by the private "Gonzo Trust." As a result, much of the current study of HST's literary influences and writing process is limited to what can be gleaned from various conversations, letters, and interviews - and I must note that he was the most unreliable of narrators. The main point I agree with Richardson about is that Thompson, while clearly a talented writer, eventually let his writing self become overshadowed or disguised by the "Raoul Duke" persona that he created. His work published in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, Hell's Angels, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 is some of the best journalism you'll read. But once the alter ego birthed by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (a watershed work, admittedly) took hold, well, we all know how that turned out.
August 16, 2022
This is what I expected, a study of Thompson’s influences and, to a lesser extent, influenced.
HST cut a broad swath through my youth with his Rolling Stone articles and the two “Fear and Loathing” books. The ‘72 campaign book made a tremendous impression on me. Sort of made me with we could have had similar tomes for each subsequent presidential campaigns.
The most fascinating part of this was his coverage of the post-F&L Thompson, the part of HST I know little about. For me, Thompson had largely disappeared except as his “Doonesberry” alter-ego Uncle Duke. By then Thompson’s notoriety eclipsed his literary output and ensured he’d never be able to do another “Fear and Loathing”.
Here we also get the cautionary tale about substance abuse. Early on, this made much of his early writing possible, influenced his style, and helped make him the public persona of Raoul Duke. Eventually though, the booze and drugs robbed him of the ability to produce much of anything.
Still, he closed on an optimistic note. Thompson and Raoul Duke are gone but they are not forgotten nor will they be for some time.
HST cut a broad swath through my youth with his Rolling Stone articles and the two “Fear and Loathing” books. The ‘72 campaign book made a tremendous impression on me. Sort of made me with we could have had similar tomes for each subsequent presidential campaigns.
The most fascinating part of this was his coverage of the post-F&L Thompson, the part of HST I know little about. For me, Thompson had largely disappeared except as his “Doonesberry” alter-ego Uncle Duke. By then Thompson’s notoriety eclipsed his literary output and ensured he’d never be able to do another “Fear and Loathing”.
Here we also get the cautionary tale about substance abuse. Early on, this made much of his early writing possible, influenced his style, and helped make him the public persona of Raoul Duke. Eventually though, the booze and drugs robbed him of the ability to produce much of anything.
Still, he closed on an optimistic note. Thompson and Raoul Duke are gone but they are not forgotten nor will they be for some time.
May 17, 2022
As a dedicated Hunter S. Thompson (HST) aficionado since the early 1970s, this author does an incredible job of researching and writing about the early years and influences of HST. I read it with great anticipation and this author delivers the goods. Well-researched with fascinating details about HST early years as a writer and liver of life. I learned things I did not know previously about HST.
This book and author makes the case quite convincingly about HST and his legacy that goes beyond Gonzo and onto his enduring contribution to American letters, in general. Ultimately, HST was on a quest to discover the whereabouts of the American Dream in his time.
All in all, an excellent read.
This book and author makes the case quite convincingly about HST and his legacy that goes beyond Gonzo and onto his enduring contribution to American letters, in general. Ultimately, HST was on a quest to discover the whereabouts of the American Dream in his time.
All in all, an excellent read.
June 21, 2022
Richardson gives us the social and literary context of Thompson's work without getting swept up in the Gonzo mystique or the biographical weirdness. I would wish for more detail and background, but that might extend the book to a social history of the sixties and seventies, given Thompson's reach. Richardson also doesn't go very deeply into the critiques of Thompson and seems agnostic as to his real contribution, but he provides enough information for you to decide for yourself, as long as you're willing to read more broadly than just FaLiLV. Especially, read Thompson's letters that have been published. Revelatory!
September 14, 2025
Factual and all, but something was missing. Maybe it was the chaotic writing Peter Richardson, maybe it’s the fact that reality is always more boring that the drugs induced reporting of HST, maybe the fact that HST was not a very pleasant person after all. I felt however that among all the facts about his life, I did not understand HST better as a flawed human being he was.
October 7, 2022
An insightful examination of the seminal events that shaped Thompson's political if not philosophical view of life in America in the late 60's through the fall of the Nixon White House. Detailed with annotations, sources, and bibliography, this is an excellent read for fans of HST.
July 28, 2022
Docked one star for trivial factual errors about CSNY at Woodstock and Elvis in Vegas.
January 16, 2023
Comprehensive, interesting review of Thompson’s work, but difficult to follow if you don’t already know the players
September 21, 2023
Not bad, but went off the tracks too much from the main subject.
July 16, 2024
Excellent biography--the most complete bio of Thompson I've read except for Peter Whitmer's volume When The Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.
November 29, 2022
It's interesting to see Hunter S Thompson’s "journalism" described in this book as "nonfiction-fiction." It certainly wasn't published that way when I first read it as a teenager in the early 70s. I thought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a plausible progression from HST’s very credible first book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. Like Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing was full-bore, participatory journalism, only now with weed and blotter acid in lieu of motorcycles and beer. The two books exaggerated scenes, particularly Las Vegas, but I accepted what I was reading as a form of subjective new journalism that was essentially factual, and I'm sure I wasn't alone. That any of it was pure fiction never crossed my mind. The narratives felt real, and the books were successful because they were sold and widely accepted as nonfiction. HST bought into it, too, and paid a terrible price. How much did he come to regret creating his doppelgänger Raoul Duke? Was he too impaired and indolent to break free, as Savage Journey suggests in passing, or did he feel trapped as a writer by the Dr. Gonzo brand, as Savage Journey also suggests? The book doesn't say enough here, but how HST popularized himself as a drug-dazed caricature and then became one was his essential tragedy. He yearned to be taken seriously as a writer.
Savage Journey could also have explored more deeply how the two central characters who worked most closely with HST in each book, Sonny Barger in Hell’s Angels and Oscar Acosta in Fear and Loathing, both came away feeling angry and vindictive because of the fictional liberties HST took, particularly Acosta. I didn't know the two fell out over HST's hilarious (but made up) depiction of Acosta as his deranged, drug addled, 300-pound Samoan attorney while the two committed multiple drug felonies in California and Nevada. Strange Journey could have dug more deeply into how often and why and to what extent HST felt free to fictionalize his journalism, especially his own participation. The book seems to assume that everyone who read HST was in on the joke. (He made it all up!) But that's not a given even though, really, when you think about it, how plausible is a deranged, drug addled, 300-pound Samoan attorney? (Plausible enough; this was the early 70s, don’t forget.)
Savage Journey includes Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 as part of HST's best work. But the book doesn't explain, or even mention, how HST fell apart as the election closed in and he was on deadline for Rolling Stone. His manic dispatches from his trashed motel room were mostly alcohol-and-amphetamine-infused gibberish. Critics and many of his fans accepted it as part of the act, but in my mind, it marked the beginning of HST's sad decline. His best, book-length work was behind him. This was what he meant when he said, "I'm really in the way as a person. The myth has taken over."
Savage Journey could also have explored more deeply how the two central characters who worked most closely with HST in each book, Sonny Barger in Hell’s Angels and Oscar Acosta in Fear and Loathing, both came away feeling angry and vindictive because of the fictional liberties HST took, particularly Acosta. I didn't know the two fell out over HST's hilarious (but made up) depiction of Acosta as his deranged, drug addled, 300-pound Samoan attorney while the two committed multiple drug felonies in California and Nevada. Strange Journey could have dug more deeply into how often and why and to what extent HST felt free to fictionalize his journalism, especially his own participation. The book seems to assume that everyone who read HST was in on the joke. (He made it all up!) But that's not a given even though, really, when you think about it, how plausible is a deranged, drug addled, 300-pound Samoan attorney? (Plausible enough; this was the early 70s, don’t forget.)
Savage Journey includes Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 as part of HST's best work. But the book doesn't explain, or even mention, how HST fell apart as the election closed in and he was on deadline for Rolling Stone. His manic dispatches from his trashed motel room were mostly alcohol-and-amphetamine-infused gibberish. Critics and many of his fans accepted it as part of the act, but in my mind, it marked the beginning of HST's sad decline. His best, book-length work was behind him. This was what he meant when he said, "I'm really in the way as a person. The myth has taken over."
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews