Hunter S. Thompson Audiobooks

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: gonzo journalism with the reporter at the centre

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.2/5 average

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Who is Hunter S. Thompson?

Hunter S. Thompson, born in 1937, was an American journalist and author, and a pioneer of New Journalism alongside Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. He announced himself with Hell’s Angels in 1967, written after a year living among the motorcycle club, and his 1970 piece The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved sealed his countercultural reputation while pointing towards the style he would make his own. He called it Gonzo: journalism in which the writer becomes a participant in the story, and its centre.

He covered George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone – collected as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 – ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the Freak Power ticket, and maintained a famous loathing of Richard Nixon. From the mid-1970s his output declined as fame and substance abuse took their toll, though he kept writing, including years as a San Francisco Examiner columnist, with much of the later work collected in The Gonzo Papers. He died in 2005, aged 67, by his own hand.

Hunter S. Thompson in audiobooks

Thompson’s prose was always a performance, which is why it detonates so satisfyingly in audio. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first serialised in Rolling Stone, is the essential text: his reckoning with what he saw as the failure of the 1960s counterculture, conducted at ferocious speed in a voice nobody has convincingly imitated since. Heard aloud, the rhythm of the sentences – the escalation, the paranoia, the sudden swerves into moral clarity – lands even harder than on the page. For UK listeners it remains the definitive tour of America at its most unhinged: appalling, hilarious and, beneath the chaos, the work of a genuine moralist.