In the spring of 1970, artist Ralph Steadman went to America in search of work and found more than he bargained for when he met Hunter S. Thompson at the Kentucky Derby. Their remarkable collaboration resulted in the now-legendary Gonzo Journalism, which would document the civil rights movement, the Nixon administration, Watergate, and the many bizarre and great events that shaped the second half of the twentieth century. When Thompson committed suicide in 2005, it was the end of a unique friendship filled with both betrayal and understanding. A rollicking, no-holds-barred memoir, The Joke's...

First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson's savagely comic account of what happened to this country in the 1960s. It is told through the writer's account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and "check it out." The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, it has "a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman...