''Prince Jellyfish'' is an unpublished novel by American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson. The novel was Thompson's first, written around 1960 while he was in his early 20s and was working as a reporter for the '' Middletown Daily Record'' in

New York State New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. stat ...

. Thompson had moved to Middletown from

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, where he worked briefly as a

copy boy A copy boy is a typically young and junior worker on a newspaper. The job involves taking typed stories from one section of a newspaper to another. According to Bruce Guthrie, the former editor-in-chief of the '' Herald Sun'' who began work ther ...

for ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

''. Little is known about the book, although in Thompson's obituary, ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' described it as "an

autobiographical novel An autobiographical novel is a form of novel using autofiction techniques, or the merging of autobiographical and fictive elements. The literary technique is distinguished from an autobiography or memoir by the stipulation of being fiction. Bec ...

about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way."Homberger, Eric
Hunter S Thompson obituary
''

Guardian Unlimited TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and ''Guardian Unlimited'', is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers ''The Guardian'' and ''The Observer'', ...

'', 02-22-2005. A short excerpt was published in Thompson's ''

Songs of the Doomed ''Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream'' is a book by the American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, originally published in 1990. This third installment of '' The Gonzo Papers'' is a chr ...

''. The book was rejected by a number of literary agents before Thompson moved briefly to

Puerto Rico Puerto Rico (; abbreviated PR; tnq, Boriken, ''Borinquen''), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico ( es, link=yes, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, lit=Free Associated State of Puerto Rico), is a Caribbean island and unincorporated ...

and then moved on to writing his next novel, '' The Rum Diary''. ''The Rum Diary'', too, remained unpublished until 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.

References

See also