Hell's Angels (1966) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

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Summary edit see section history

Write a summary of the plot or a synopsis of this book.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Sonny Barger: Club President of the Oakland chapter.
• Terry The Tramp: Has lived all over the country, has no roots, relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action. Longest bout with stability was a 3 year hitch in the Coast Guard. Has worked half-heartedly as a tree-trimmer, mechanic, bit actor, laborer, and hustler of various commodities. Tried college for a few months but quit to get married, which ended in divorce after two years and two children. Estimates his total jail time at about six months. He blames 'the cops' for making him a full-time outlaw.
• Murphy: Add a description of this character.
• Ken Kesey: Author Of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' and ''Sometimes a Great Notion'.
• Pete
• Magoo
• Allen Ginsberg: Poet
• Baxter
• Bass Lake
• Mohr
• Murray
• Reno
• Phil
• Frank
• Nick
• Miles
• Williams
• Harley
• Cohen
• Lewis
• Larry
• Tommy
• Bobo
• Dirty Ed: A motorcycle outlaw all of his adult life. Works as a bike or auto mechanic around East Bay cities ans not professionally ambitious. At 6'-1" and 225 pounds, he looks like a beer-bellied wrestler, balding on top and gray at the temples, with a stringy oriental beard, and just looks mean.
• Dorothy Connors: Oakland chapters 'bondsman', a handsome middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair, who drives a white Cadillac, and treats the Angels gently, like wayward children. 'These boys are the back-bone of my business,' she says. '. . . the Angels come down to my office each week to make their payments. They really pay the overhead.'

Quotes edit see section history

• “They are so aware of their mad-dog reputation that they take a perverse kind of pleasure in being friendly.”

• “There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It's a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quaterlies, but it won't change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors...but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best.”

• “Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or posessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.”

• “They are blind to the irony of their role...knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or croaked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power.”

• “These are the people we should be working on - making love to them - blowing our minds and theirs -softening them, enlarging their consciousness and our own too in the process - not fighting eachother”

  Allen Ginsberg

• “Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence.”

• “ALL MY LIFE MY HEART HAS SOUGHT A THING I CANNOT NAME”

  Unknown

• “The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

• “The girls stood quietly in a group, wearing tight slacks, kerchiefs and sleeveless blouses or sweaters, with boots and dark glasses, uplift bras, bright lipstick and the wary expressions of half-bright souls turned mean and nervous from too much bitter wisdom in too few years.”

  Author

• “<Kenneth> "Country" <Beamer> died in the best outlaw tradition: homeless, stone broke, and owning nothing in this world but the clothes on his back and a big bright Harley.”

  Author

• “. . . but the Angels inhabit a world in which violence is as common as spilled beer, and they live with it as easily as ski bums live with the risk of broken legs.”

  Author

• “For at least one generation and sometimes two they <Angels> come from people who never owned anything at all, not even a car. The Hell's Angels are very definately a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken.”

  Author

• “Basically they're <Angels> just like Negroes. By themselves they're no more trouble than anybody else - but the minute they get in a group they go all to pieces, they really do.”

  San Francisco policeman

• “The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or campassion.”

  Saul Alinsky

• “Like beauty and honesty, promiscuity is in the eyes of the beholder - at least among the Angels.”

  Author

• “The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasure of gratification; and this trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceeded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egotistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts.”

  Robert Lindner - Rebel Without a Cause

• “So the Hell's Angels, by several definitions, including their own, are working rapists . . . and in this downhill half of our twentieth century they are not so different from the rest of us as they sometimes seem. They are only more obvious.”

  Author

• “Most <Angels> try to stick with limited combinations - such as beer, pot and Seconal; or gin, beer and bennies; or wine and LSD. But a few will go the whole route and on top of everything else shoot some methydrine or DMT and turn into total zombies for hours at a time.”

  Author

• “Like price fixing, tax evasion and embezzlement, psychedelic crimes seem to be a vice of the fatter <middle & upper> classes.”

  Author

• “Their <Angels> lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment . . .”

  Author

• “A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels view of humanity.”

  Author

• “In the cheap lonliness that is the overriding fact of every outlaw's life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one.”

  Author

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• East Oakland
• California
• San Francisco
• Los Angeles
• Laconia
• New York
• Sacramento
• Berkeley
• Monterey, California
• Vietnam
• Fresno
• Bay Area
• United States
• Hollywood
• East Bay
• Richmond
• San Bernardino
• Madera County

Organizations edit see section history

• Hell's Angels: The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC) is a worldwide one-percenter motorcycle gang and alledged organized crime syndicate whose members typically ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In the United States and Canada, the Hells Angels are incorporated as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation. Their primary motto is, "When we do right, nobody remembers. When we do wrong, nobody forgets". Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service classify the Angels as one of the "big four" (Hell's Angels, Pagans, Outlaws, and Bandidos) motorcycle gangs, contending that members carry out widespread violence, drug dealing, trafficking in stolen goods, and extortion. Members of the organization have continuously asserted that they are only a group of motorcycle enthusiasts who have joined to ride motorcycles together, to organize social events such as group road trips, fundraisers, parties, and motorcycle rallies.

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• abulia: Loss or impairment of the ability to make decisions or act independently.(Psychiatry) Psychiatry a pathological inability to make decisions

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The motorcycle: "The motorcycle is obviously a sexual symbol. It's what's called a phallic locomotor symbol. It's an extension of one's body, a power between one's legs." Dr. Bernard Diamond, U of Calif. criminologist, 1965
• outlaw cyclists and homosexuality: The best-known public link between outlaw cyclists and homosexuality is a film titled 'Scorpio Rising' - an underground classic of sorts, created in the early 1960s by a young San Francisco film-maker named Kenneth Anger, filmed mostly in Brooklyn, NY.
• Westward Movement and white trash: Reference to Nelson Algren's novel, A Walk on the Wild Side - ". . . the best historical description of American white trash ever written." These misfits, criminals, debtors, and social bankrupts of every description were not pioneers moving west, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. "Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California." Algern called them "fierce craving boys" with "a feeling of having been cheated."

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Hunter S. Thompson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 364.106'6'09794

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Popular Culture
• Books › Nonfiction › True Accounts › True Crime
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology
• Books › Nonfiction › Crime & Criminals › Criminology
• Books › Literature & Fiction

More Books Like This edit see section history