“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” still bites, 50 years on

WHEN HUNTER S. THOMPSON left Los Angeles for Las Vegas in 1971, in the company of Oscar Acosta, a Mexican-American lawyer and Chicano activist, he did not mean to write a cult novel. Thompson was working on a piece about Ruben Salazar, a Mexican-American journalist killed the previous year by a tear-gas canister fired by police during a march against the Vietnam war. Acosta, his main source, was worried about being seen with a white writer—but agreed to go with Thompson to Las Vegas, where he was due to produce the captions for a series of photographs of the Mint 400 off-road desert race. The roman à clef that arose from the trip, published in two parts in Rolling Stone that autumn, was an elusive blend of fact and fiction, observation and exaggeration.