SOURCE: A review of The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, in The New York Times Book Review, July 13, 1997.

In the following review, Kaiser calls Thompson's The Proud Highway "neither particularly interesting nor particularly well-written."

In the introduction to this nearly 700-page collection of the letters of Hunter S. Thompson, the novelist William J. Kennedy provides a useful definition of the "gonzo journalism" that made Thompson famous. "It was not lunacy defined," Kennedy writes, "but lunacy imagined: in short, a novel." Unfortunately, in these pages Thompson most often cnfines himself to the mundane facts of his everyday life between 1955 (when he was 17 years old) and 1967 (following the publication of Hell's Angels), and the results are generally underwhelming. Occasionally we see flashes of humor or intelligence, but for vast stretches we are subjected to observations like these: "I have paid my rent for one month. The apartment...