bikinirussianbrides

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Love las vegas wikipedia is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on two trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, that Hunter S. Thompson took with attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta in March and April 1971.

Thompson wrote that he concluded their March trip by spending some 36 hours alone in a hotel room “feverishly writing in my notebook” about his experiences. These writings became the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had “liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it. Weeks later, Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to report for Rolling Stone on the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs being held from April 25-29, 1971, and to add material to the larger Fear and Loathing narrative.

On April 29, 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time while completing “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” the article chronicling the death of Salazar. The novel lacks a clear narrative and frequently delves into the surreal, never quite distinguishing between what is real and what is only imagined by the characters. The preface quotes Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Throughout Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the protagonists go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess, while Las Vegas symbolizes the coarse ugliness of mainstream American culture.

The “wave speech” is an important passage at the end of the eighth chapter that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. There was madness in any direction, at any hour.

If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Thompson often cited this passage during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel. Fear and Loathing” in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles.