In the last entry we took a look at Laurens Van der Post, a great travel writer and pillar of British high society, who, it transpired after his death, simply invented a great deal of his 'factual' writing.
Today we're going to look at a travel writer who wasn't part of anyone's high society: Hunter S. Thompson.
If you're of a sensitive disposition, Dr. Thompson (he bought the doctorate from a theological correspondence college in the 1960s) is probably not the writer for you. Powered bya rough mix of sex, drugs, alcohol and profanity, his writing doesn't so much look at the underbelly of the American Dream as slice it open and investigate the intestines. Although the good doctor proudly advertised his slackness with regard to facts he was very concerned to tell the truth as he saw it. He also thought the role of the journalist was to get involved and drive the story. One of Thompson's earliest successes was a piece called 'Fear and Loathing at the Kentucky Derby'. He'd be sent to cover the race but in the end he didn't even see it - he was more concerned to get involved with the crowd and document the grisly detail of the drinking, debauchery and violence that was going on.
For someone we're calling a travel writer, Thompson didn't actually travel very far. Although he was posted on various assignments to South America and the Caribbean, and he lived for a while in Puerto Rico in the early sixties, most of his writing is about the USA. Probably his most famous book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was published in 1971 and reissued to coincide with the Johnny Depp movie in 1998. Fear and Loathing - like Thompson's earlier Puerto Rico travel book, The Rum Diaries (which wasn't actually released until the late nineties) - masquerades as a novel. You can certainly read it that way, and it does have fictional episodes in line with Thompson's conception of gonzo journalism. But in essence it's the true story of a Thompson roadtrip to Vegas in the company of his friend and lawyer, Oscar Aosta.
As we've said, Hunter S. Thompson isn't for the faint-hearted. Although his writing is richly descriptive of people and places, and often bitterly funny, there is nothing cozy or comfortable about it. Thompson took his own life in 2005 at the age of 67, and it's unlikely that he's going to be accepted into anyone's mainstream anytime soon.