In 1965, the edi­tor of The Nation asked Hunter S. Thomp­son to write a sto­ry about the Hel­l’s Angels Motor­cy­cle Club, as they’re offi­cial­ly known. The arti­cle quick­ly led to a book deal, and, the next year, the Gonzo jour­nal­ist pub­lished Hel­l’s Angels: The Strange and Ter­ri­ble Saga of the Out­law Motor­cy­cle Gangs. Review­ing the book for The New York Times, Leo Lit­wak wrote:

Hunter Thomp­son entered this ter­ra incog­ni­ta [the world of the Hel­l’s Angels] to become its car­tog­ra­ph­er. For almost a year, he accom­pa­nied the Hel­l’s Angels on their ral­lies. He drank at their bars, exchanged home vis­its, record­ed their bru­tal­i­ties, viewed their sex­u­al caprices, became con­vert­ed to their motor­cy­cle mys­tique, and was so intrigued, as he puts it, that “I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hel­l’s Angels or being slow­ly absorbed by them.” At the con­clu­sion of his year’s tenure the ambi­gu­i­ty of his posi­tion was end­ed when a group of Angels knocked him to the ground and stomped him…

Hunter Thomp­son has pre­sent­ed us with a close view of a world most of us would nev­er dare encounter, yet one with which we should be famil­iar. He has brought on stage men who have lost all options and are not rec­on­ciled to the loss. They have great resources for vio­lence which does­n’t as yet have any effec­tive focus. Thomp­son sug­gests that these few Angels are but the van­guard of a grow­ing army of dis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed, dis­af­fil­i­at­ed and des­per­ate men. There’s always the risk that some­how they may force the wrong options into being.

This clip, which aired on Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion in 1967, describes the cir­cum­stances that led up to the Angels giv­ing HST a beat down. The misog­y­ny that’s on dis­play will make you shud­der.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Hunter S. Thomp­son Inter­views Kei­th Richards

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son

The Franz Kaf­ka Soci­ety announced yes­ter­day that it was award­ing the pres­ti­gious Franz Kaf­ka Prize for 2011 to the Irish writer John Banville, who has built a rep­u­ta­tion for being one of the finest prose styl­ists work­ing in English–and for being a bit dif­fi­cult.

First, there are the books them­selves. “In their archi­tec­ture and their style,” wrote Belin­da McK­eon in the intro­duc­tion to Banville’s 2009 Paris Review inter­view, “his books are like baroque cathe­drals, filled with elab­o­rate pas­sages and some­times over­whelm­ing to the casu­al tourist.” And then there is the per­son­al­i­ty. When Banville won the 2005 Man Book­er Prize for his nov­el The Sea, he pro­claimed, “it is nice to see a work of art win the Book­er Prize.” As he explained lat­er to The Vil­lage Voice, “the Book­er Prize and lit­er­ary prizes in gen­er­al are for mid­dle-ground, mid­dle­brow work, which is as it should be. The Book­er Prize is a prize to keep peo­ple inter­est­ed in fic­tion, in buy­ing fic­tion. If they gave it to my kind of book every year, it would rapid­ly die.”

Art may not be for every­one, but for those who have read his books–16 nov­els pub­lished under his own name, four crime nov­els under the pen name Ben­jamin Black, and one col­lec­tion of short stories–there is no doubt that Banville is an artist. “It all starts with rhythm for me,” Banville told the Paris Review. “I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was some­thing odd about it that I could­n’t quite put my fin­ger on. Then I read an inter­view in which he admit­ted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it–there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pic­to­r­i­al, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose does­n’t sing. For me, a line has to sing before it does any­thing else. The great thrill is when a sen­tence that starts out being com­plete­ly plain sud­den­ly begins to sing, ris­ing far above any expec­ta­tion I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark Decem­ber days when I think about how I could be liv­ing instead of writ­ing.”

For an exam­ple of Banville’s singing prose, we leave off where The Sea begins:

They depart­ed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morn­ing under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, ris­ing to unheard-of heights, the small waves creep­ing over parched sand that for years had known no wet­ting save for rain and lap­ping the very bases of the dunes. The rust­ed hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remem­ber must have thought it was being grant­ed a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spec­ta­cle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blis­ter, lead-blue and malig­nant­ly agleam. They looked unnat­u­ral­ly white, that day, those birds. The waves were deposit­ing a fringe of soiled yel­low foam along the water­line. No sail marred the high hori­zon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.