Rum diary

Hunter Thompson began writing The Rum Diary in 1959, while working for the Puerto Rican newspaper The San Juan Star as a sports correspondent. Thompson made friends with many of his colleagues, who later became prototypes for the characters of the Rum Diary.

Unlike the later gonzo -style journalist, the events in The Rum Diary have a lot of fiction. Hunter was 22 years old at the time of writing the novel, but in The Rum Diary, he writes of himself as a tired and aging 32-year-old journalist who has been wandering around Europe and the USA for 10 years.

The author was refused several times the publication of the novel in the 1960s and 1970s. The manuscript of The Rum Diary was found in Hunter Thompson's papers by his friend Johnny Depp while preparing for the filming of The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . The book was first published in 1998, simultaneously with the release of the film "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

Hunter S. Thompson's alter ego , journalist Paul Kemp, is in Puerto Rico at the invitation of Letterman, editor in chief of the Daily News newspaper. Among the newspaper's reporters, alcoholics and loafers predominate, as a result of which the newspaper is on the verge of closure.

Kemp meets the locals: the photographer and the "only professional on the island" Sala, the hard-core drunkard Moberg, the hot and aggressive Jimon and his girlfriend Chenot, whom Paul immediately falls in love with.

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