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

“Dunne is characteristically at his best when he plays it straight, cataloging the minutiae of his subjects’ particular hells like an after-hours John McPhee . . . Vegas [is] the best vaccination against 1970s nostalgia I’ve ever received. Compared with this, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads as a colorful salute to a great American city . . . [A] messy, engrossing book . . . I’m so glad it’s back in print.”

—Andrew Martin, The New York Times Book Review

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

—David Halberstam

“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

“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’s book—all measured calm on the surface, and pure hysteria beneath it—gives the lie to even the best examples of the ‘New Journalism’ . . . all those self-important ‘participatory’ accounts of tough writers who dive right into the maelstrom, but somehow never risk anything. Dunne’s persona in Vegas is not all that different from Philip Marlowe’s in Los Angeles; Dunne’s book, like, say, Farewell, My Lovely, is partly about the struggle to accept the changes a perception of horror forces on a person, without crossing over the invisible line where one becomes a part of the horror.”

—Greil Marcus, City

“Dunne’s account of a season spent on the Vegas Strip is a dark journey into the soul of American capitalism and it makes for just as harrowing a read fifty years after the fact. It’s deeply personal and utterly unsettling.”

—Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“This classic, first published in 1974, is not so much a memoir as it is a fictional retelling of what John Gregory Dunne actually did do: separate from his wife, Joan Didion, and three-year-old daughter in Los Angeles and move to Las Vegas . . . He ended up with enough material to create a fevered dream of a memoir . . . McNally Editions does its usual first-class job in its reissue of Vegas, complete with an excellent foreword by Stephanie Danler.”

—Jim Kelly, Air Mail

“Dunne’s book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), is better—funnier, sadder, more appealingly vile—than these other attempts by his contemporaries to pin Sin City to the page . . . Dunne found his perfect subject in Las Vegas, a place that reflected all the themes of his life and granted him, in the middle of his Dantean ‘dark season,’ the opportunity to take full stock of himself . . . Dunne’s voice [is] dry, intelligent, candid, slightly guilty, probing.”

—Max Callimanopulos, Los Angeles Review of Books

“John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas is the masterly account of a surreal tour of an even more surreal place, by a writer too honest to deny that he is, sometimes at least, a vandal and a voyeur. His report is disturbing, provocative, and, most of all, mordantly funny.”

—Jane Howard

“John Gregory Dunne’s rollicking paean to Sin City, first published in 1974 and long out of print, inevitably reads as a kind of rejoinder to Play It As It Lays, published by Joan Didion, his wife, four years earlier . . . Part of the joy in revisiting Dunne’s picaresque is the speculation.”

—Randy Kennedy, Hauser and Wirth Ursula Magazine

“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

“John Gregory Dunne’s fictionalised memoir is written with a great deal of wit and panache . . . Dunne [has a] genius for gloomy empathy.”

—Clancy Sigal, Times Literary Supplement

“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) was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist. His books include five novels, seven works of narrative nonfiction, and a posthumous collection of essays. He and his wife, Joan Didion, collaborated on many screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, the Barbra Streisand version of A Star is Born, and True Confessions. Two of his books, The Studio and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, are about working in the movie business.

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

Jul 22, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 40

5" x 8.5" • 288 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341333