Hunter S. Thompson created an explosive, first-person, gonzo style of reportage that brashly pushed the language and limits of American literary journalism into boldly original new directions. With weird humor and strident apocalyptic invective, his fractured, drug-crazed persona of the quintessential outlaw journalist was an actor's mask, a comic ploy he used to engage a lifelong moral and political critique of American culture and its institutions. The masterpiece of his gonzo repertoire, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), hailed as the "Best Book on the Dope Decade" and an "Epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties," has gained the status of postmodern classic in late-twentieth-century American literature. The major themes of the gonzo canon--death, doom, and failure of the American dream--are the linchpins of his distinctively Southern literary style played out with gothic black humor on the...