Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season

“In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” So begins John Gregory Dunne’s neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage.

Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is “a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined.” The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had “spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby”—these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie; and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator. 

John Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.

“The best book about Sin City ever written. Yes, better even than Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . . . Dunne has Thompson beat. His grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas . . . What happened to John Gregory Dunne in Vegas didn't stay in Vegas, and he was all the better for it. So will you be after reading this phenomenal book.”

—Sean Manning, Esquire

“A marvelous book—half reportage, half autobiography on the silky side of hell.”

—David Halberstam

“Dunne set himself up in a tickytacky Vegas apartment and began to roam the Strip, in search not so much of adventure as of the company that misery loves . . . Their stories are funny, poignant and fascinating, and Dunne tells them with sympathy but without sentiment . . . A fine, wry, perceptive, graceful book that does as much for the dark side of the American funhouse as Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did for the manic side.” 

—Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review

“Dunne knows the terrain so well and describes it in such precise, measured, understated style that he makes his hell a thing of beauty . . . It is as though Dunne had set out to find an environment that was the perfect objective correlative for the misery he was carrying around inside him. And whether or not he set out to find it, Las Vegas was there waiting for him, waiting for a writer of his talent and perception to come along and tell us what it is really like.”

—Bruce Cook, The New Republic

“A brilliant . . . wild, sardonic and funny anat­omy a Fun City . . . a porno movie between covers . . . It is sexually explicit, the dialogue is rough, but recorded with the highest fidelity . . .  The reader will not be able to put the book down.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“In this hilarious and sometimes frightening maverick of a book, some Vegas denizens—a hooker, a dealer, a second-string comic—and John Gregory Dunne—willingly enter the confession box. The result is a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, limned by a brilliant reporter.”

—Brian Moore

“Powerful, disturbing, entertaining and significant.”

—Los Angeles Times

John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) began his writing career as a reporter for TIME magazine. He published five novels, a volume of criticism, and seven works of narrative nonfiction, including The Studio and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, both about the movie business. With his wife, Joan Didion, Dunne collaborated on a number of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, and A Star Is Born.

Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of Stray and the international bestseller Sweetbitter. She is the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter television series on Starz.

Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341326

Jun 17, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 40

5" x 8.5" • 288 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341333