Before Hell's Angels and Fear and Laothing on Las Vegas sealed his position at the pinnacle of outlaw American journalism, Hunter S. Thompson began his first novel. It was 1959, he was twenty-two, and as he explained at the time to his friend, the author william kennedy, The Rum Diary would "in a twisted way … do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris."
Up to that point, Thompson had been honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the "ill-tempered wandering rabble" who staffed Puerto Rico's San Juan Daily News during the last strange gasp of the 1950s. Puerto Rico was an unspoiled tropical paradise then-before Castro, before JFK, before civil rights & moonwalks & flower power & Vietnam & protests & even before drugs-but the News was a vortex & a snakepit of all the corrupt new schemes & plots & greedmongers who swarmed in. Paul Kemp, the hero of The Rum Diary, puts it simply: "In a sense I was one of them-more competent than some and more stable than others-and in the years that I carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed….I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt highend restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it."
The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel by Hunter S. Thompson is a poignant first work by a young journalist destined to become a literary legend.