Rolling Stone has published the freshest, rawest, hippest, most savage writing around, and in the process has changed the face of American journalism. Since twenty-one-year-old Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967, it has interacted with the surrounding culture in a way no publication has before or since - pioneering, breaking barriers, reinventing what journalism is, what it can talk about, what it can do.
Over the years, Rolling Stone has given its writers only one overriding edict: take chances. The magazine's willingness to push the envelope has attracted the talents of the best, brightest, brashest minds of our time - in Lawrence Wright's words, "literary hellcats who brushed aside journalistic conventions and social taboos to get at new ways of telling the truth." And by giving these minds free rein, Rolling Stone has been the forum for the freshest and most inventive journalism of the last quarter century.
The Best of Rolling Stone is a collection of thirty-seven of the magazine's most important and influential articles of the last twenty-five years, by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Tim Cahill, Greil Marcus, Kurt Loder, and P. J. O'Rourke. Included is an inttoduction by founder and editor-in-chief Jann Wenner, and new prefaces by each writer describing in intimate and sometimes lurid detail the story behind the story - what it's like to work in the cultural hothouse that is Rolling Stone. The result is both a dazzling compilation of the best journalism of the past quarter-century and a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the maverick magazine that made it happen.
The range of these articles is breathtaking. From Thompson's chronicles of Fear and Loathing in the Nevada desert to Wolfe's tale of the Brotherhood of the Right Stuff from Howard Kohn's search for the truth behind the murder of Karen Silkwood to Greil Marcus's meditation on the death of Elvis Presley, The Best of Rolling Stone is a rich and definitive documentation of a revolution in modern journalism, and a sly, subversive chronicle of our times.