1972 About The Author


Page added: 1997
Last updated: 2002

This note comes from a 1972 printing of Hell's Angels. Interestingly enough, the Ballantine ads at the back offer books from John Gardner and Penthouse how-to sex manuals. The back cover reads, in part, "the Jean Genet of the New Journalism - riding and living with The Great American Menace - THE HELL'S ANGELS!" The front cover topper reads "FEAR AND LOATHING IN CALIFORNIA!". Original price: $1.50, if you can believe it! You might want to compare this one with the original and jacket copy from a first edition. My 1991 copy of Hell's Angels contains only the first paragraph of the above. The advertising is gone, and the book seems rather bare. The first printing of HA I read was published sometime in the seventies. It had been rebound, unfortunately, because it was so worn. This copy was later stolen from the Edmonton Public Library. It's a given that HST's books disappear fast.

HUNTER THOMPSON is a free-lance writer from San Francisco, Aspen and points east. His research on the Hell's Angels involved more than a year of close association with the outlaws - riding, loafing, plotting, and eventually being stomped. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he began writing as a sports columnist in Florida. He started his first novel while studying at Columbia University in New York. Since then he has worked on newspapers and magazines in New York, San Juan and Rio de Janeiro. His articles have appeared in The Reporter, The Nation, and Esquire.

In the early sixties, while working as a Caribbean stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Thompson began a second novel, The Rum Diary. It was finished in Big Sur. Later he became a South American correspondent for the National Obsrdver, living on Copacabana Beach and traveling extensively throughout that continent. Upon his reutrn to this country, suffering from amoebic dysentery and culture shock, he retired to hunt elk and breed Doberman pinschers in Woody Creek, Colorado.