**National Bestseller ** New York Times Notable Book “Nobody tells you that reading Hunter S. Thompson novels as a young adult male while serving in the military is a potentially very bad idea. Some things you simply must absorb and learn on your own.” —Sturgill Simpson Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary —a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book—is Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean. Begun in 1959 by a 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. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing books. “Crackling, twisted, searing, paced to a deft prose rhythm . . . A shot of Gonzo with a rum chaser.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Enough booze to float a yacht and enough fear and loathing to sink it.” — New York Daily News “A great and an unexpected joy . . . Reveals a young Hunter Thompson brimming with talent.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer “At the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, Puritan, even an innocent. The Rum Diary gives us this side of him without apology . . . with a kind of pride." — The Washington Post Book World " A remarkably full and mature first novel . . . a languid and lovingly executed book that reveals its emotional depths slowly." — Salon “Thompson flashes signs of the vitriol that would later be turned loose on society.” — USA Today "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 San Juan. There, too were the beginnings of his future as a masterful prose stylist." —William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed "The Run 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 Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 , Screwjack , Kingdom of Fear , The Great Shark Hunt , Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone , Hell’s Angels, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . He died in February 2005. Chapter One My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me. I did some drinking there on the night I left for San Juan. Phil Rollins, who'd worked with me, was paying for the ale, and I was swilling it down, trying to get drunk enough to sleep on the plane. Art Millick, the most vicious cab driver in New York, was there. So was Duke Peterson, who had just come back from the Virgin Islands. I recall Peterson giving me a list of people to look up when I got to St. Thomas, but I lost the list and never met any of them. It was a rotten night in the middle of January, but I wore a light cord coat. Everyone else had on heavy jackets and flannel suits. The last thing I remember is standing on the dirty bricks of Hudson Street, shaking hands with Rollins and cursing the freezing wind that blew in off the river. Then I got in Millick's cab and slept all the way to the airport. I was late and there was a line at the reservations desk. I fell in behind fifteen or so Puerto Ricans and one small blonde girl a few places ahead of me. I pegged her for a tourist, a wild young secretary going down to the Caribbean for a two week romp. She had a fine little body and an impatient way of standing that indicated a mass of stored-up energy. I watched her intently, smiling, feeling the ale in my veins, waiting for her to turn around for a swift contact with the eyes. She got her ticket and walked away toward the plane. There were still three Puerto Ricans in front of me. Two of them did their business and passed on, but the third was stymied by the clerk's refusal to let him carry a huge cardboard box on the plane as hand baggage. I gritted my teeth as they argued. Finally I broke in. "Hey!" I shouted. "What the hell is this? I have to get on that plane!" The clerk looked up, disregarding the shouts of the little man in front of me. "What's your name?" I told him, got my ticket, and bolted for the gate. W