Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman Read Free

smoking and drinking heavily. I advised him to curb these vices and proceed into his sixtieth year with moderation, the only course to take if he was going to get on with his work.
    â€œI myself now drink only the occasional glass of red wine,” I told him.
    He acknowledged I was probably right, and stubbed out his cigarette.
    â€œGod will be good to us,” he said, ingesting some peculiar substance through a tube.
    â€œThe work is the only thing that matters,” I said.
    â€œI know that,” he said “That’s why I’m writing a novel. Perhaps two novels.”
    â€œOh yes, two novels,” I said. “I heard that story in San Juan.”
    Averill Park, New York
October 23, 1996
    1 William J. Dorvillier who won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for the
Star
’s editorials on a church-state controversy.

EDITOR’S NOTE
BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
    Don’t loaf and invite inspiration
Light out after it with a club.
    â€”Jack London
    At noon on November 22, 1963, Hunter S. Thompson heard the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and reacted by sitting down at his typewriter. In a letter to his friend William Kennedy (who twenty years later would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
Ironweed
), he vented his anger. “There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything—much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder,” Thompson wrote from his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. “… From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency.”
    â€œFear and loathing”—without apologies to Søren Kierkegaard—soon became Thompson’s trademark phrase, his shorthand for justified contempt toward an overindulgent and dysfunctional consumer culture. Whether it was used in connection with the Hell’s Angels, Richard Nixon, or Southeast Asia, “fear and loathing” served as Thompson’s all-purpose epithet, encapsulating the death of the American Dream. In 1996, Thompson’s comic masterpiece
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1971), long a cult favorite, was selected by the Modern Library for inclusion in its renowned list of affordable editions of world classics, catalogued between Thackeray and Tolstoy. Thompson’s other popular title featuring the trademark phrase—
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
(1973), which
The New York Times
deemed the “best account yet published of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process”—is likewise scheduled to join the distinguished Modern Library ranks. And now, in 1997, here is
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman,
1955–1967, the first installment of a projected three-volume “Fear and Loathing Letters” collection. It includes, along with more than two hundred others, that historic 1963 letter to William Kennedy.
    The letters within these pages are only a fraction of the approximately twenty thousand Thompson has composed since he was a young boy. Whether at his childhood home on Ransdall Avenue in Louisville, in a Greenwich Village garret, or on a beer barge going down the Magdalena River in Colombia, Thompson corresponded ferociously, always making carbon copies, hoping they would be published someday as a testament to his life and times. “These were the pre-Xerox days,” Thompson has commeritedabout his surprising pack-rat nature. “And I was anal retentive in my desire to save
everything.”
    The earliest letters archived at Thompson’s Owl Farm ranch are dated 1947, when, as a precocious ten-year-old, Thompson began covering neighborhood sports and soliciting subscribers for his own four-cent, two-page mimeographed newspaper,
The Southern Star.
At age twelve he was firing off missives to the editor of the Louisville
Courier-Journal,
complaining about the