However, he felt that the more time passed, the more difficult it was to write about an increasingly distant era. Thompson finished a draft of The Rum Diary in the early sixties but continued to work on it throughout that decade, ultimately selling it to Random House after they agreed to publish his first book, Hell's Angels. "I still can't beat that goddamn Gatsby." Thompson himself stated that he wanted to write the Great American Novel.
The narrative uses a highly paced and rather exciting style, also typical of Thompson's oeuvre. The prominent characters are typical of Thompson's work: violent, maniacal and alcoholic, stumbling through life. While in Puerto Rico, Thompson befriended many of the writers at the Star, providing the context for The Rum Diary 's fictional storyline.Īlthough Thompson wrote his narrative at the age of 22, it deals extensively with a fear of "going over the hill" and growing old. Thompson had unsuccessfully applied to work at the larger English-language daily called The San Juan Star which novelist William J. Thompson himself travelled from New York to San Juan in 1960 to write for an ill-fated sports newspaper on the island of Puerto Rico. Set in the late 1950s, the novel encompasses a tangled love story involving jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust among the Americans who staff the newspaper.
It is Thompson's second novel, preceded by the still-unpublished Prince Jellyfish. The story involves a journalist named Paul Kemp who, in the 1950s, moves from New York to work for a major newspaper, The Daily News, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The manuscript, begun in 1959, was discovered among Thompson's papers by Johnny Depp. It was written in the early 1960s but was not published until 1998. The Rum Diary is an early novel by American writer Hunter S. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
0 kommentar(er)
