Hell's Angels

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography

Hell's Angels surprised me in two different ways. Published in 1967, it's based on Hunter S. Thompson's interactions with the Hell's Angels motorcycle club in the mid-Sixties, back when the Angels were a notorious but still small-scale club and Thompson had yet fully embraced writing about his lunacy.

These Hell's Angels are thugs and renegades. They look and act much like how movies and shows portray them: sweaty, hard-partying renegades with an intense disrgeard for the law and white-collar society. But they are not yet the romanticised version that we've seen in everything from The Simpsons to Sons of Anarchy.

But they are on their way, already under the leadership of Sonny Barger, arguably the most famous Hell's Angels president. Thompson captures their story just as their notoriety got started.

I know Thompson from his Gonzo era, Expressed in books like The Great Shark Hunt and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and in the movie adpation of the latter, and the Thompson pseudo-biop[ic, Where The Buffalos Roam. The ggonzo era starts with Thompson's brilliant and ireverent coverage of the 1970 Kentucky Derby in a magazine article, and he never really left its orbit.