Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

William Stephenson (University of Chester)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication Nov 1971 - Nov 1971

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” (3): the opening sentence of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has become one of the most famous in American literature. It tells the reader exactly what the novel will deliver: a risky journey through a hostile environment by protagonists high on dangerous chemicals. Although influenced by sources such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Norman Mailer’s autobiographical fiction The Armies of the Night (1968) and the semi-fictional New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (hereafter Vegas) defined its own distinctive territory very clearly when first …

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2555 words

Citation: Stephenson, William. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 February 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=20177, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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