New York: Random House, 1971 [i.e., 1972]. First edition. A Near Fine copy in like dust jacket. Some fading to the board edges, as usual, but a clean copy throughout. Dust jacket with slight fading to spine. Overall, an appealing copy of Thompson's most famous work.

The crackling and infamous roman à clef, the genre-defining work of "gonzo journalism" from the man Tom Wolfe called “the twentieth century’s greatest comic writer in English.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on the experiences Thompson had travelling with activist Oscar Zeta Acosta (nicknamed "Dr. Jonzo" within the work). Thompson had originally wanted to speak to Acosta as part of a story he was writing on a Mexican journalist who had been killed by the Los Angeles Police Department, and the two men had gone to Las Vegas to find a safer and less charged place to speak, away from the racial tensions of the city. The account was originally published in Rolling Stone in November 1971; publication in book form followed in 1972, in dust jackets dated "6/72" on the rear flap (as here).

Fear and Loathing was later adapted into the 1998 cult classic film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.

"The whole book boils down to a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out” (contemporary New York Times review). Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. (Item #8058)