The Rum Diary

“The Rum Diary” was begun in 1959 by then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel, and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that “The Rum Diary” would “in a twisted way…do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” did for Paris.
” In Paul Kemp, the novel’s hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the “ill-tempered wandering rabble” on staff at the “San Juan Daily News” at the time. “I shared a dark suspicion,” Kemp says, “that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.
” “The Rum Diary” is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. “It was a gold rush,” says the author. “There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit.
” Puerto Rico was an unspoiled tropical paradise in those years — before Castro, before JFK, before civil rights & moonwalks & flower power & Vietnam & protests & even before drugs — but the “San Juan Daily News” was a vortex & a snakepit of all the corrupt new schemes & plots & greedmongers who swarmed in. Paul Kemp, “The Rum Diary”‘s narrator, speaks for the unfocused angst of those times: “In a sense I was one of them — more competent than some and more stable than others — and in the years that carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote adcopy for new casinos and bowling alleys, I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way.
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