Nearly 200 personal letters by Hunter S. Thompson to a lifelong friend are up for auction today. Bidding ends today (9/27) at 5pm PDT. The minimum bid is $110,000 and there are no bids as of this writing. From Nate D. Sanders Auctions:
Archive includes Thompson's famous letter written the day of JFK's assassination (the complete letter, which was only partially published in "Proud Highway"), and other extremely controversial letters, such as brutal and unpublished details of his time at the Slates Hot Springs in Big Sur, where he patrolled the grounds, including the baths, when he served as its caretaker. Many letters deal with writing "The Rum Diary", his time with (and beating by) the Hell's Angels and the book about them that made him famous, and trying to get published in the early 1960s when he was a struggling author...
On 22 June 1965, Thompson gets a check to write "on Cycle gangs", in part, "you are thinking in terms of 40 years from now, while I hesitate to think beyond 40 days. Or -- at the moment -- six months, due to the contract I just signed: $6000 guarantee against royalties for a paperback on Cycle gangs…Things are hopping and I shouldn't be writing letters. I have to whip up an outline for the Cycle book and right now I don't have the vaguest idea what I'll write…Incredible. I've been drunk for two weeks." He continues on 6 July, "I warn you that you are going to find me a much tougher and shittier person than the one you left in Louisville 2 years go…It has finally come home to me that I am not going to be either the Fitzgerald or the Hemingway of this generation…I am going to be the Thompson of this generation, and that makes me more nervous than anything else I can think of…
