The Rum Diary

A LONG LOST NOVEL

bestseller
customer reviews

The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. 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.

"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 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."

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 a gold rush," says the author. "There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit."

Choose a format:

Book details:

Simon & Schuster Audio |
ISBN 9781442349940 |
October 2011

$23.95 List Price

Buy from another retailer:

iTunes

Praise

“

”

“Crackling, twisted, searing, paced to a deft prose rhythm . . . A shot of Gonzo with a rum chaser.”

– San Francisco Chronicle

“Enough booze to float a yacht and enough fear and loathing to sink it. ”

– New York Daily News

“A great and an unexpected joy . . . Reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent. ”

– The Philadelphia Inquirer

“At the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, Puritan, even an innocent. The Rum Diary gives us this side of him without apology . . . with a kind of pride. ”

– The Washington Post Book World

“Thompson flashes signs of the vitriol that would later be turned loose on society. ”

– USA Today

‹ ›

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me.

I did some drinking there on the night I left for San Juan. Phil Rollins, who'd worked with me, was paying for the ale, and I was swilling it down, trying to get drunk enough to sleep on the plane. Art Millick, the most vicious cab driver in New York, was there. So was Duke Peterson, who had just come back from the Virgin Islands. I recall Peterson giving me a list of people to look up when I got to St. Thomas, but I lost the list and...