Hunter S. Thompson’s Puerto Rican Rum Diary

by Emma Stratton
Hunter S. Thompson was 22 when he began work on The Rum Diary, a novel based on his own experiences working as a journalist in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1959. Not published for another 30 years, the book chronicles the turbulent, alcohol-imbued times of Paul Kemp, a young American journalist working for a floundering English newspaper in San Juan. At the time, many Americans went to Puerto Rico in search of a piece of action in "America's Caribbean." The island was considered by tourism companies, developers and banks to be an undeveloped goldmine and suddenly, large sums of mo...