The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967

A “deliriously entertaining” (Time) collection of letters that takes us inside the twisted mind of Gonzo journalist and acclaimed political analyst Hunter S. Thompson

“Brilliantly bizarre … a celebration of the '60s.”—USA Today

“Thompson has become the F. Scott Fitzgerald of our time.”—The Washington Post

Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America’s most influential and incisive journalists: Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who’s Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez—not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors—Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective.

Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedented and penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter.