title: The RUM DIARY: The Long Lost Novel
author:  Hunter S. Thompson 
description: The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would "in a twisted way...do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris." In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the "ill-tempered wandering rabble" on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. "I share a dark suspicion," Kemp says, "that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other -- that kept me going." The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery &amp; violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. "It was a gold rush," says the author. "There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit."
zlib_text: ![](Thompson%2c%20Hunter%20S%20-%20The%20Rum%20Diary%20map.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  The Rum Diary
  
  The Long Lost Novel
  
  by Hunter S. Thompson
  
  eVersion 4.0 / Notes at EOF
  
  Back Cover Blurbs
  
  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. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an
  outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling Fear and
  Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels.
  
  A great and an unexpected joy. . . reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming
  with talent. -\- The Philadelphia Inquirer
  
  The tools Hunter S. Thompson would use in the years ahead -- bizarre wit,
  mockery without end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative
  of the wounded meritorious ego, and the idiopathic anger of the righteous
  outlaw -- were all there in his precocious imagination in 