“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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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 07 October 2024.]