Begun in 1959 by a then twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico,in the late 1950s.The autobiographical hero, a young writer dreaming of Hemingway but stuck in a dead-end newspaper job, embarks on a carousing, hell-raising journey through the tropics. Along the way, he comes between a wild-spirited comrade and his temptress girlfriend and gets in the middle of a violent clash between the island culture and the encroaching American tourist values.
Exuberant and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's best-selling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels.