Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel in the gonzo journalism style by Hunter S. Thompson. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in autobiographical incidents. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Doctor Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze, all the while ruminating on the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement. The work is Thompson's most famous book and is noted for its lurid descriptions of illicit drug use and its early retrospective on the culture of the 1960s. Thompson's highly subjective blend of fact and fiction, which it popularised, became known as gonzo journalism. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 before being published in book form in 1972. It was later adapted into a film of the same title in 1998 by director Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, who portrayed Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively.
Plot
In 1971, journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, are driving from LA to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 Motorcycle race. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiker, and Duke explains the preparation for the trip, including gathering several drugs and renting the "Great Red Shark". Shortly after explaining, the two scare off the hitchhiker, and then take a large dose of LSD and finish the drive to Vegas.The two arrive in the lobby of the Mint Hotel, while still under the influence of LSD. Duke has bizarre hallucinations and acts strangely, culminating in him perceiving everyone in the bar to be giant lizards, devouring the women within the area. Gonzo, who is able to keep a level head throughout all of this, signs the two in with press credentials, and brings Duke up to their hotel room. They later leave to get an early look at the Mint Gun Club, where the race will be held. While there, Duke meets Lacerda, a photographer assigned to work with them.
The next day, Duke and Gonzo go to the bar at the gun club and wait for the race to start. Once it starts, Duke is unable to tell what is going on, and goes on a side-by-side ride with Lacerda, to capture photos. Eventually, Duke gives up and leaves.
Later that night, Duke and Gonzo are driving around Vegas intoxicated. After struggling to find parking, they go to the Desert Inn to see a Debbie Reynolds performance. The pair get kicked out of the show for smoking marijuana. They then huff some ether and wander around the Circus Circus, in a drunken stupor. While in the Circus Circus, Gonzo starts to feel the effects of the mescaline pills that he took earlier, and the two leave. Back in the hotel room, Gonzo keeps getting worse. When Duke eventually calms him down, he reminisces about the 1960s, and goes to sleep.
He wakes up the next morning and finds that Gonzo is gone and there is a pile of room service receipts. Unable to pay, he flees, hoping to make a quick drive back to Los Angeles. While driving along in an extremely paranoid state, Duke eventually calls Gonzo, and finds that he was supposed to check into the Flamingo Hotel and cover a national police meeting on drug use.
After Duke finishes checking into the hotel, he is attacked by a teenage girl named Lucy who has traveled from Kalispell, Montana to Las Vegas to gift Barbra Streisand portraits she made of the singer. He then learns that Gonzo gave her LSD to "help her out" only to find that she is a devout Christian and has never even used alcohol. The two give her more LSD, and then drop her off at a different hotel, hoping she will not remember them. However, when they get back to the hotel room, they find that Lucy has left them a message, and is asking Gonzo for help. Gonzo manages to trick her into thinking that Duke drugged both of them, and that Gonzo is now being arrested, advising her to hide. Afterwards, Gonzo advises Duke to take adrenochrome. When Duke takes it he experiences nightmarish hallucinations before eventually falling asleep.
The next day, they attend the drug convention, where they observe a comically out of touch presentation by a police "drug expert". Later, the two drive in Las Vegas, and encounter a family from Oklahoma, to whom Gonzo aggressively tries to sell heroin. Afterwards, they stop at a diner in North Las Vegas, where Gonzo makes a provocative and offensive gesture to the waitress, leading to a confrontation.
Next morning, the two rush to the airport and upon realizing they are about to miss a flight to L.A., Duke drives onto the runway area of the airport, drops Gonzo off and escapes through a break in a fence. After the departure of his lawyer, Duke spends the remaining days in his hotel suite recounting memories from Aspen, and attempting to purchase an ape. Duke returns to Circus Circus to acquire the ape, but discovers it's been taken by animal control after attacking another patron. After a while, Duke himself boards a plane to Denver. The book ends with Duke purchasing Amyl Nitrite from the airport pharmacy, and consuming them in front of the petrified pharmacist.
Origins
The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on two trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, that Hunter S. Thompson took with attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta in March and April 1971. The first trip resulted from an exposé Thompson was writing for Rolling Stone magazine about the Mexican American television journalist Rubén Salazar, whom officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had shot and killed with a tear gas grenade fired at close range during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in 1970. Thompson was using Acosta—a prominent Mexican American political activist and attorney—as a central source for the story, and the two found it difficult for a brown-skinned Mexican to talk openly with a white reporter in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, California. Needing a more comfortable place to discuss the story, they decided to take advantage of an offer from Sports Illustrated to write photograph captions for the annual Mint 400 desert race being held in Las Vegas from March 21–23, 1971.Thompson wrote that he concluded their March trip by spending some 36 hours alone in a hotel room "feverishly writing in my notebook" about his experiences. These writings became the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
What originally was a 250-word photo caption assignment for Sports Illustrated grew to a novel-length feature story for Rolling Stone; Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had "liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication—which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it." He had first submitted a 2,500-word manuscript to Sports Illustrated that was "aggressively rejected."
Weeks later Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to report for Rolling Stone on the National District Attorneys Association's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs being held from April 25–29, 1971, and to add material to the larger Fear and Loathing narrative. Besides attending the attorneys' conference, Thompson and Acosta looked for ways in Vegas to explore the theme of the American Dream, which was the basis for the novel's second half, to which Thompson referred at the time as "Vegas II".
File:Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta, Las Vegas 1971.jpg|thumb|Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta in Caesars Palace, March–April 1971
On April 29, 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time while completing "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," the article chronicling the death of Salazar. Thompson joined the array of Vegas experiences within what he called "an essentially fictional framework" that described a singular free-wheeling trip to Vegas peppered with creative licenses.
In November 1971, Rolling Stone published the combined texts of the trips as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream as a two-part story, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who two years before had worked with Thompson on an article titled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved". Random House published the hardcover edition in July 1972, with additional illustrations by Steadman; The New York Times said it is "by far the best book yet on the decade of dope," with Tom Wolfe describing it as a "scorching epochal sensation."
The "wave speech"
The "wave speech" is an important passage at the end of the eighth chapter that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. Thompson often cited this passage during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel:In High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, David S. Wills explains how the "wave speech" was influenced by Thompson's use of The Great Gatsby as a literary template. He argues that the entire wave passage replicated the rhythm, not to mention the theme, of the final page and a half of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel. Thompson himself frequently compared his book to The Great Gatsby.
Title
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Thompson's most famous work and is known as Fear and Loathing for short; however, he later used the phrase "Fear and Loathing" in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles.In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, Thompson said of the phrase: "It came out of my own sense of fear, and a perfect description of that situation to me, however, I have been accused of stealing it from Nietzsche or Kafka or something. It seemed like a natural thing."
He first used the phrase in a letter to a friend written after the Kennedy assassination, describing how he felt about whoever had shot President John F. Kennedy. In "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved", he used the phrase to describe how people regarded Ralph Steadman upon seeing his caricatures of them.
Jann Wenner claims that the title came from Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock.
Another possible influence is Fear and Trembling, a philosophical work by existentialist Søren Kierkegaard published in 1843. The title is a reference to a line from a Bible verse by St. Paul, Philippians 2:12, that man works out his salvation "in fear and trembling."