[pause]

Salon: You’ve also referred to your beat as the “Death of the American Dream.” That was the ostensible subject of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Has it just sort of been on its deathbed since 1968?

HST: I think that’s right.

Salon: A lot of people would argue with you about that anyway, and believe that the American Dream is alive and well.

HST: They need to take a better look around.

Salon: But in a way, haven’t you lived the American Dream?

HST: Goddammit! [pause]. I haven’t thought about it that way. I suppose you could say that in a certain way I have.

2003 interview with Salon

Old punks

inverted drafting via wired

Despite his best efforts not to oversell the Angels, many readers felt a strong kinship with them. Thompson received countless letters from fans inquiring about club membership. To one teenage fan, Thompson provided strong cautionary words. “The best of the Angels,” he wrote in a letter dated July 6, 1967, “the guys you might want to sit down and talk to, have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who left are almost all the kind who can't do anything else, and they're not much fun to talk to. They're not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They're just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk.”

Marc Weingarten - The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution