The Hell's Angels is HST at his best, before the booze and the drugs and The Reputation got a hold of him. It made his reputation as the enfante terrible of New Journalism, and holds up today as a look at the fascinating all-American subculture of outlaw bikers. Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels for about two years, hanging out in their drinking holes, attending rallies in small California towns, and introducing them to Ken Kesey and the hip East Bay scene acid scene of 1965.

Thompson depicts the Hell's Angels as they are, crude violent outcasts who achieve a strange kind of grace behind the handlebars of a chopped Harley, and who are hopelessly oppressed by the world in any other situation. The Angels as they are just want to drink, fuck, do any drugs they can reach, and ride motorcycles. Sure, they wear ratty jeans literally soaked in motor oil and fight at the slightest provocation, but that's because the world cut them out, so fuck the world.

But where it went wrong is in the period when Thompson was writing this book, the Hell's Angels became famous, subject of the lurid Lynch Report and articles in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. They became automotive barbarians, destroying towns and raping innocent women. Cast in the mold of heroic celebrities, their aura of calculated menace curdled. The scene turned bad, with heavy heat from state and local cops, and weird conflicts. In the end, the Angels beat upThompson for some slight and kicked him out for good, but he got one hell of a book out of the whole weird journey.