Mirroring Thompson’s experience, Paul Kemp arrived at a newspaper that was like a sinking ship. (Despite rejection, the two remained lifelong friends.) Still desperate to get down to San Juan, Thompson accepted a more dubious position at El Sportivo, a fledgling English weekly about sports, and relocated in 1960. Thompson tried to get a job at The San Juan Star, but was rejected by the editor, William Kennedy, who went on to become a successful writer and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Ironweed. Puerto Rico was like another West, where people dreamt of staking out a piece of paradise and getting rich. It was a certain kind of journalist that was drawn to this situation. The American journalists were there to report and, hopefully, to get caught in the currents. 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 money were pouring in from all directions. 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. 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.
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