Hunter S. Thompson was an American original and a man in the right place at the right time. At a time when nothing in U.S. politics and very little in the United States was making any sense, Thompson sidestepped the traditional journalists role. He didn’t try to ‘make sense’ of things, he simply chronicled what he saw and the culture he lived in and did it in spectacular fashion.
If you’ve read Thompson’s classic ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas‘, chances are you’ve read the more polished version that was published in 1972. The original, raw, 23,000 word version of the story though appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone in November of 1971 with illustrations by Ralph Steadman.
Now Rolling Stone has placed the original version on their website, where you can read it for free. You can read the original version as the author intended and not as the author intended after he’d thought about it awhile longer.
via: Open Culture