Hell’s Angels: The Strange & Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Hunter S. Thompson – 1966

The book that put Thompson on the map and set him on the road towards his masterwork Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), Hell’s Angels is one of Thompson’s earliest dissections of the American Dream, revealing so much absurdity and hypocrisy in our culture and yet uncovering moments of courageous individualism too. The book couldn’t have appeared at a more appropriate time; even a year earlier or later might have seemed off. 1966 was also the year of Roger Corman’s film The Wild Angels, which kicked off the biker movie craze that culminated with Easy Rider (1969). It was also the time when biker gangs moved from the periphery of outlaw culture to highly visible players in the mass media. Led by Sonny Barger – (whom Thompson befriended) – the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels were the preeminent motorcycle club in the world. Those who hated them promoted the most lurid exaggerations, and those who liked them romanticized them into latter-day exemplars of freedom and manhood. Thompson’s visceral and ironic style elevates the book above standard reporting and, coming on the heels of Truman Capote’s equally groundbreaking In Cold Blood (1965), heralded the so-called New Journalism that didn’t really amount to much, in my opinion, beyond these two books and Tom Wolfe's writing. With his trademark self-deprecating humor, Thompson depicts his efforts to fathom the Angels’ cloistered world and ways, to the extent that he buys his own bike – (the wrong kind, not a Harley), takes a spill on the highway and is hassled by cops and panic-stricken civilians alike. The prose is often thrilling, especially when the subject allows Thompson to express his own discontentment and his grudging respect for a lifestyle he cannot intellectually embrace; as in this famous passage:

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others – the living – are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. ...But the Edge is still out there."