Books

New York: The Modern Library, 1996. Reprint. Near Fine/Near Fine. First Modern Library and twenty-fifth anniversary edition, first printing. Signed by Hunter S. Thompson and inscribed on the half-title, "Dear Selma, Thank you for all your help - Jim says I can't write anything else... Love, HST, Hunter." The recipient was the New York book publicist Selma Shapiro, the wife of Thompson's editor, Jim Silberman. Despite Jim's oversight, Thompson has sneakily drawn a swastika in a heart on the title page of this copy. Silberman published Thompson's first book Hell's Angels in 1967, and spent the next few years trying to coax another book out of his erratic author. His encouragement, advice, and criticism of Thompson's work-in-progress, tentatively titled "The Death of the American Dream" and eventually published as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is collected in Douglas Brinkley's Fear and Loathing in America (2000). Remarking on Thompson's writing practices, Silberman famously said…

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.