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 eÎss, 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 San Juan. There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winnin author of Ironweed

''The Rum Diary shows a side of human nature that is ugly and wrong. But it is a world that Hunter Thompson knows in the nerves of his neck. This is a brilliant tribal study and a bone in the throat of all decent people."

Jimmy Buffett