The provocative and scandalous description of the dark side of America by the legendary writer. A seemingly never-emptying bottle of rum, Puerto Rico on the brink of rebellion and tourist obliteration, cynical adventurers posing as journalists teetering between imprisonment and escape, women fiercely chasing the next moment, mobsters making their escape from Castro's Cuba: An aimless yet captivating throng of people who, with surreal lightness and dogged persistence, seek the "good" but find only the damp and inhospitable San Juan, police chases, and repeated explosions of desire.

Their spasmodic movements and resignation in the face of destiny evoke heroes of Hemingway, struggling to find their place within the all-devouring vortex of the already irreparably wounded "American Dream." The characters are masterfully crafted through the strength of their contradictions, trapped between "unrestrained idealism and a sense of impending doom," and the action never stops, even when everything calms down.

Hunter Thompson takes a first dive into the oceans of his talent and prepares the lightning he will unleash in the years to follow. Written in 1959 when Thompson was 22 years old and working as an editor for a newspaper in San Juan, the Drunken Diary is the author's first – partly autobiographical – novel.

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) Widely known for his groundbreaking travelogue Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas of '72, which was adapted into a film by Terry Gilliam in '98, Thompson was one of the pioneers of the new – or "gonzo," as he called it – journalism in the late 1960s.

Its innovation was that the journalist was not just an observer but participated in events and recorded them with a subjective viewpoint. He gained fame when he began writing for Rolling Stone about the underground situations that would later lead to the subculture movement that shook the USA. The Hell's Angels gang, LSD experiments, and the US colonial policy in Latin America were captured in his books as "a provocative, disturbing, and scandalous description of the dark side of America."

On February 20, 2005, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67 on his farm in the Colorado mountains, where he had lived in isolation in his later years.