Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs was Thompson's first book to be published, but it was preceded by two novels, Prince Jellyfish, as yet unpublished, and The rum diary, which was begun in 1958, and finished around 1960, but remained unpublished until 1998.The novel is a fairly joyful story on a sunny island, of a young journalist who discovers how to make a living off writing for a small, local newspaper. Disappointingly, Hell's Angels reads more like a journalistic compilation of newspaper clippings than a semi-autobiographical work, possibly to avoid conflict with the Angel's chapter he had been part of. Perhaps most well-known for Hell's Angels, Thompson lived and rode with the Hells Angels for a year, as a kind of 'participating observation' before publishing his book on the notorious motor club. Still, Thompson was apparently able to channel his energy into a literary production, which has unique features, sparking a genre of itself, and producing very readable works of fiction. Thompson's life is quite remarkable, and from its earliest days showed a fascination with the underground, not just literary, but gearing towards the criminal and rough underbelly of society. Still, while classified as belonging to 1960s counter-culture, his work is not affiliated to the Beat Generation.

Thompson largely plays out 'on the wild side'. 'There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit.' Read more The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.' 'I share a dark suspicion,' Kemp says, 'that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was his first novel and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would 'in a twisted way.do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris.' In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the 'ill-tempered wandering rabble' on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S.

The rum diary thompson