Hunter S. Thompson ranks among the first and foremost practitioners of New Journalism, a genre that evolved in the 1960s to reflect the particular mood of those times. Thompson, who has called his brand of reporting "Gonzo Journalism," was perhaps the most visible--and most vituperative--of the New Journalism correspondents, a group whose ranks included Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, among others. As national affairs editor for Rolling Stone, freelance writer, and author of such widely read books as Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72, Thompson recorded both the disillusionment and the delirium of a volatile era. According to Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, Thompson "paraded one of the few original prose styles of recent years," a style that indulged in insult and stream-of-invective to an unparalleled degree. He pioneered a new approach...