Typed Letter, signed "Hunter" to his friend Paul Semonin, with original typed mailing envelope

Beschreibung

Written by Thompson when he was living in New York, working for Time Magazine (and using their envelopes), after having left the Air Force only a few months earlier. He writes to his friend Paul Semonin, from Louisville, and a fellow member of the Athenaeum Literary Association. Semonin went to Yale and kept in touch with the younger Thompson via letters. In the early 1960s, Semonin would tag along with Thompson in the Caribbean, while Thompson was working on the manuscript of what would become The Rum Diary, and was marooned in Bermuda with him for a time. At the time of this letter, Semonin was enlisted in the Marines, and Thompson commiserates with his experience of Bootcamp, and tells him: "what you are seeing is a cross-section of 'the world we live in,' rather than an invasion of flotsam from some distant land," and that "intellectural myopia is not a disease limited to dolts and mental defectives". He goes on to offer his thoughts of the politics and culture of the day, in his characteristic voice: "As for me, I have no hope for any of us: If Khrushchev and Mao don't get us from the outside, either the Arthur Schlesinger Walter Reuther faction or the William Buckley Gerald L.K. Smith faction will paralyze us internally. The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear. Is it any wonder that Billy Graham is so popular? Oh God give us anything but reality!" He then discusses some of the finer negociating points of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, and ends with these fatal words: We cannot afford to back down and we cannot afford war: jesus help us all if it is NOT a bluff. If the Reds have decided that the time has come for a big push, then you'd better learn to like that uniform. My next address with be somewhere in Mexico." The letter appears in the book of Thompson correspondence, The Proud Highway. General light wear to envelope; letter near fine with original folds, light creasing.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 352952

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Bibliografische Details

Titel

Typed Letter, signed "Hunter" to his friend Paul Semonin, with original typed mailing envelope

Erscheinungsjahr

1958

Einband

Softcover

Verkäuferkataloge

• Literature