Summary Of Fear And Loathing In America By Hunter S. Thompson

“The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy” (Thompson, 2001, para. 14), is the closing line of Hunter S. Thompson’s article titled “Fear & Loathing in America,” which is a journalistic opinion piece on the attacks of 9/11. Thompson is considered one of the most unique journalists in American literary history. He is also considered a non-journalist by many – a writer whose style was too outrageous for fact-seekers and contemporary writers of his time. As a major and influential journalist of the New Journalism style of the 1960’s and 70’s, and the father of Gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson had great panache for journalistic parody and exaggeration. According to the Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of American Literature, “[Thompson] applied innovative methods such as stream-of-consciousness, exploded syntax, and collage to create one of the most unique American prose styles ever written” (“Hunter S. Thompson”, 2009, p. 1566).

The authors themselves played protagonists in their writing and the end result, sometimes, presented an amalgam of fact and fiction. The degree with which an author bent the truth, employed literary devices, and involved himself in the work as a character, differed among the writers of the New Journalism style, but Thompson was definitely on the extreme side, so much so that a new genre was named, Gonzo Journalism, based on his eccentric and unconventional style of