Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano layer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo," a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge. Written with uninhibited candor and manic energy, this book is Acosta's own account of coming of age as a Chicano in the psychedelic sixties, of taking on impossible cases while breaking all tile rules of courtroom conduct, and of scrambling headlong in search of a personal and cultural identity. It is a landmark of contemporary Hispanic-American literature, at once ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.

Born in 1935, Oscar Zeta Acosta was an activist in the Chicano Movement and an attorney. His friendship with Hunter S. Thompson provided fodder for that author’s best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Acosta was dramatized as the eccentric Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo. Acosta disappeared in Mexico in 1974 and is presumed dead.