"Facts are lies when they're added up . . . you have to add up the facts in your own fuzzy way, and to hell with the hired swine who use adding machines," wrote Hunter S. Thompson in a 1965 letter to Knopf editor Angus Cameron. Since then, Thompson has kept accounts his own way in Hell's Angels and the eight books that follow. He wrote two of the seminal works on the politics of the late twentieth century (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 and Better Than Sex ), eye-opening "studies" of the drug and motorcycle cultures (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels ), and reams of salient political and social commentary ranging from his early South American articles for the National Observer to his "national correspondence" in Rolling Stone . A film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is in production, featuring Johnny Depp in the role of the angst-ridden, drug-addled journalist. His new piece in Time ("Fear and Loathing in Hollywood: Doomed Love at the Taco Stand"), putatively about the movie, marks Thompson's triumphant return to the publication where he once worked as a copy boy.

The proud highway: saga of a desperate southern gentleman , covers Thompson's formative period of 1955-67, and is the first volume in a projected trilogy of the God of Gonzo's letters. The correspondence spans a period encompassing the last days of Thompson's high school career (he spent graduation day cooling his heels in a Louisville jail cell, charged with armed robbery), his first forays into journalism as an Air Force sportswriter, a short and ill-fated attempt to hold down a "real" newspaper job, and his sojourns in New York, Puerto Rico, South America, California, and Colorado, culminating in the release of Hell's Angels . The collection of Thompson's correspondence, edited by Douglas Brinkley, may be the ultimate validation of Thompson's real writing ability and political acumen. It is also the reading public's first real chance to examine the early development of Thompson's trademark style.

Included in the volume are some of the pieces that made Thompson the inspiration for the "Duke" character in Doonesbury : a self-penned "news release" that mysteriously appeared in the Eglin Air Force Base Command Courier , identifying Thompson as the suspect in a fictional attack on the gatehouse guard ("Thompson was . . . described by a recent arrival in the base sanatorium as 'just the type of bastard who would do a thing like that'"), the correspondence surrounding his "application" for the governorship of American Samoa ("Immediately upon receipt of [your letter] I went to Brooks Brothers and purchased several white linen suits and other equipment befitting the Governor . . ."), and his attempt to cajole the CEO of American Motors into giving him a new Rambler ("The nut of my argument is that I'm driving around in something that I -- in your position -- would go to great lengths to hide from the general public").

Functioning as a writer in a world of feel-good liberals, militant leftists, and crank conservatives, Thompson has always managed to project a visceral libertarianism, a frank and savage objection to the signs of the times and the people and processes that make them what they are. If he's generally regarded as leaning to the left, it has never prevented him from recognizing -- and skewering with  sharp polemic -- the systemic problems of the state as such: "My position is and always has been that I distrust power and authority, together with all those who come to it by conventional means -- whether it is guns, votes, or outright bribery. There are two main evils in the world today: one is Poverty, the other is Governments. And frankly I see no hope of getting rid of either. So it will have to be a matter of degrees, and that's where we quarrel," Thompson wrote to his Marxist friend Paul Semonin in early 1964. He also said that "the 'civilized' nations of this earth have created in the 'underdeveloped' lands nothing more or less than a cheap and ragged imitation of their own Big System that has gone by the name of 'government' since man invented the word." Thompson feels in his gut the wrongness of the over-protective, manic-depressive bitch that is modern society and the modern state. And it is on the "gut level" that the reader agrees (or disagrees).

The young Thompson apparently benefited from exposure to the ideas of Ayn Rand. The editor's notes preceding a 1957 missive to high school friend Joe Bell indicate that he considered her a "kindred spirit" and often loaned out copies of her books. "To discuss The Fountainhead would be useless -- " he cautions Bell, "even more so with a person who understands it than one who doesn't . . . although I don't feel that it's at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the concept of individuality, I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it in one way or another, and I think that I'll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence."

And yet Thompson's entire body of work might be classified as "sudden outbursts of frustrated violence" -- directed with deadly aim against the killers of the American dream, those who are "heroes first, and punks later, and then heroes again when people have forgotten what real punks they were" (on Jean-Paul Sartre and Norman Mailer, to Semonin in 1964). And he seems to refer to the same group in his own Author's Note to The Proud Highway : "Their work and their lives and their long-range professional Fate would be a lot easier if I went out on a slick Ducati motorcycle one night and never came back."

It won't be necessary for some future generation to exhume the corpse of the Great American Dream for autopsy purposes. The coroner's report is already in, and it's signed: Hunter S. Thompson.