Proud Highway:Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sake of brevity. The main objective was to avoid distracting the reader while preserving the rhythm, the vitriol, the flight of imagination, and the genuine warmth with which Thompson wrote Preceding most of the letters is a brief editor’s note to provide a sense of historical context and narrative continuity. Footnoteswere added to assist the reader in identifying characters, events, and terms without providing too much commentary.
    To inventory this vast treasure trove, the Hunter S. Thompson Letters Project was created at the University of New Orleans’s Eisenhower Center for American Studies. The goal of the center’s scholars is to study all facets of twentieth-century America, and after spending a week with Thompson at Owl Farm, I became convinced that his correspondence was of great importance to the history of postwar journalism, literature, politics, and popular culture. Since the Eisenhower Center alalready houses historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s Richard Nixon Project Papers, it seemed appropriate that the center also sponsor a project devoted to our thirty-seventh president’s arch nemesis.
    Besides the letters, Thompson has also saved at Owl Farm hundreds of notebooks containing his handwritten journalistic jottings and two unpublished novels. “Prince Jellyfish” (1959–1960) and “The Rum Diary” (1961–1966), both containing some of his best early prose. The archive also contains a dozen unpublished Thompson short stories, including “Hit Him Again Jack,” “Whither Thou Goest,” and “The Cotton Candy Heart,” and a slew of fully realized but as yet unpublished “gonzo journalism” pieces on such disparate topics as Bill Monroe’s bluegrass music, Jimmy Carter’s White House triumph, and Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983. A respected photojournalist influenced by Robert Frank and Walker Evans, Thompson was compulsive about his craft in the early 1960s, his archive houses hundreds of his stark black-and-white images. But above and beyond all else there are the cardboard boxes of correspondence.
    Taken together, the “fear and loathing” letters in
The Proud Highway
compose an informal and offbeat history of two decades in American life. The history is more intimate than anything in the score of sensationalized Hunter S. Thompson biographes, and it is in some ways more illuminating than the picture of the tumultuous times we find in his own published writing. But the letters do more than merely speak for their time. They also speak for their author, comprising a memor of both Hunter S. Thompson’s formative years and the explosive birth of the Sixties counterculture he so brilliantly chronicled.
    New Orleans, Louisiana
December 14, 1996
    1 R.W.B. Lewis,
The American Adam Innocence Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century
(Chicago, 1955)
    2 The books are Peter O. Whitmer,
When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson
(New York 1993), Paul Perry
Fear and Loathing. The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson
(New York, 1993), E. Jean Carroll,
Hunter The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson
(New York, 1993), and William McKeen,
Hunter S. Thompson
(Boston, 1991)

AUTHOR’S NOTE
BY HUNTER S. THOMPSON
    The second woe is past, and behold, the third woe cometh quickly.
    â€”Revelation 11: 14
    Today is Friday the thirteenth in Louisville. The sky is low and the view from the penthouse suite at the Brown Hotel is dense. There is only one window in the hotel that opens, and I have it right here in my room. My chief of security had it chiseled open yesterday, despite the whining of the manager, who said it was an invitation to suicide.
    Yesterday was better Yesterday, December 12, 1996, was officially declared by the mayor to be Hunter S. Thompson Day in Louisville. I was awarded the Key to the City and the sun was bright like a fireball.…