BOOKS: THE MASK BEHIND THE MAN

GONZO WRITER HUNTER THOMPSON'S EARLY LETTERS REVEAL THE SERIOUS AMBITIONS OF A FEROCIOUS WIT

Hunter Thompson launched himself at Parnassus much as he did at everything else, with guns blazing, a bulletproof heart and unflagging dead aim. Yet if the first dirty secret of the 350 or so youthful letters collected in The Proud Highway (Villard; 683 pages.; $29.95) is that the Unabomber of contemporary American letters was writing like a paranoid madman even in his teens, the second is that he was doing so because he was a well-read and ambitious man determined to claim his place in literary history. Meticulously keeping carbons of all his 20,000 letters, and taking himself seriously even when...

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