Songs of the Doomed

by Hunter S. Thompson

Simon and Schuster, 1990

While I was struggling to write my first book on this guy — Hunter S. Thompson (Twayne, 1991) — he was struggling to write this book and deal with a recent arrest. We ended up helping each other out a good deal.

Hunter was stuck on the book and his longtime assistant, Deborah Fuller; his intern, Catherine Sabonis-Bradley; and his San Francisco Examiner editor, David McCumber, were all trying to extricate the manuscript from his brain.

Then I began pelting him with questions and, according to Cat, that ended the logjam.

I got the interview I needed for my book and he felt cleansed enough to finish this tome, which was tied to a project from the 1960s that he’d started to write but never finished, a book to be called “The Death of the American Dream.”

He used part of my interview (uncredited) in this book and used more of it in a later book, Kingdom of Fear.

Here is the complete interview, which we call “Doing Time on the Proud Highway.”