Fear and Loathing: Hunter S. Thompson and Thomas Wolfe
When you read the phrase “fear and loathing” most readers think of author Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005). His second novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) is considered his most famous book. Like Thomas Wolfe’s work it is deeply autobiographical. It was followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973). Almost forty years earlier Thomas Wolfe had written “Drowning! Drowning! Not to be endured! The abominable memory shrivels, shrinks, and withers up his heart in the cold constriction of its fear and loathing.” Is there a connection?
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is well known for its garish descriptions of illegal drug use and graphic perspective of 1960s culture. The story follows Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo as they venture to Las Vegas on a “long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.” The dust jacket notes, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page.” Thompson’s intermingling of facts and real events with fictional components later generated the term “gonzo journalism.” Originally, the novel was published in 1971 in Rolling Stone as a two-part series, but was later published in its entirety in 1972. It was adapted to the big screen twice. First in 1980 in “Where the Buffalo Roam” starring Bill Murray. Again in 1998, starring Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.
In the biography Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson’s America, author William Stephenson explains Thompson’s initial use of “fear and loathing,” noting it was from Thomas Wolfe’s third novel The Web and the Rock, whose protagonist, George Webber, is “appalled by the squalor of his own background.” Douglas Brinkley, close friend and literary executor of Hunter S. Thompson provided more insight via interviews for Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, an oral biography containing recollections from family, friends, agents and coworkers. Thompson confessed that he “lifted it from Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock.” Thompson “had read the novel when he lived in New York. He used to mark up pages of favorite books, underlining phrases that impressed him. On page sixty-two of The Web and the Rock he found ‘fear and loathing’ and made it his.” Brinkley asked him why he didn’t give Wolfe credit, Thompson admitted “it was too much of a hassle, that people would think he meant Tom Wolfe, his New Journalism contemporary.”
