Thompson Never Did Tell A Lie That Didn't Have A Hint Of The Truth To It. While Joyce And Faulkner - And Even Agee - Might Have A Bone To Pick With That High Water Mark Of 20th Century Literature Business, It's A Remarkably Full And Mature First Novel. But After Spending Decades Languishing On Various Publishers' Desks (although Portions Of The Novel Have Appeared Elsewhere), A Reworked rum Diary Has Finally Appeared, In Its Modest But Youthful Glory. Nearly A Decade Away From The So-called Gonzo Reporting On The Hell's Angels And Las Vegas That Would Make Him A National Institution, He Was Prone To Such Desperate Overstatements. Thompson Was A Journalist In His Early 20s At The Time, Having Left New York City To Take A String Of Reporting Jobs In Puerto Rico. It Is A Novel More Gripping Than the Ginger Man, More Skillfully Rendered Than the Sergeant, More Compassionate Than a Death In The Family, And More Important Than lie Down In Darkness.

Thompson Wrote In A 1961 Letter To His Friend And Fellow Aspiring Novelist William Kennedy, Referring To The Novel He Was Working On At The Time. Packed With All The Self-destructive Excess His Fans Have Come To Expect, Thompson's Long-lost Semiautobiographical First Novel Is A Tangled Love Story Of Jealousy, Treachery, And Alcoholic Lust Set In The 1950s Boomtown Of San Juan, Puerto Rico.mark Athitakisthe Rum Diary Is The Potential High Water Mark Of 20th Century Literature, Hunter S.

The rum diary novel