Hunter S. Thompson

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Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. He was known for his flamboyant writing style, most notably deployed in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which blurred the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and nonfiction. It became known as gonzo journalism and was widely imitated.

Early years

A Louisville, Kentucky native, Thompson began his career in 1956 as a sports journalist, writing for the base newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, where he was serving. After the Air Force, Thompson worked briefly as a copy editor for Time Magazine while maintaining a beat-inspired lifestyle in New York City.

Thompson traveled extensively in the Caribbean and South America, writing freelance articles for a number of U.S. daily newspapers. While in Puerto Rico, he befriended the journalist William Kennedy. Thompson eventually became a South American correspondent for a Dow Jones owned weekly newspaper called The National Observer.

File:Gonzo quote.PNG
A modification of one of Thompson's original Gonzo flyers during his bid for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.

In the meantime, Thompson wrote two serious novels (Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary) and many short stories. Despite repeated submissions to publishers, only "The Rum Diary" was ever published -- in 1998, long after it was written, and long after he had become a celebrity. Kennedy later remarked that he and Thompson were both failed novelists who had turned to journalism in order to make a living.

He was married to Sandra Dawn Conklin on 19 May, 1963; they divorced in 1980. The couple had one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, born March 23, 1964.

Thompson got his big break in 1965 when he was approached by Carey McWilliams with an idea for a story about his relationship with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, a group which had allegedly been involved in various murders and gang-rapes. After the article was published by The Nation (May 17, 1965), numerous book offers on the subject came his way, and Random House published the hard cover Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966. In her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, radical feminist Susan Brownmiller strongly criticized the treatment of gang-rape in his book.

In the late sixties, Thompson received a "doctorate" from a mail-order church while living in San Francisco.

Middle years

He later worked for Rolling Stone magazine, and Ron Shen, where his next two books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 were first serialized.

Published in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a first-person account by a journalist (Thompson as "Raoul Duke") on a trip to Las Vegas with his "300-pound Samoan" attorney (Oscar Zeta Acosta as "Dr. Gonzo") to cover a narcotics officers' convention and the "fabulous Mint 400" motorcycle race. During the trip, the journalist and his lawyer become sidetracked by a search for the American dream, with the aid of copious amounts of LSD, ether, adrenochrome, reefer and other drugs.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is a collection of Rolling Stone articles he wrote while covering the election campaigns of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George McGovern. The book focuses almost exclusively on the Democratic Party's primaries and the breakdown of the party as it splits between the different candidates. Thompson would go on to become a fierce critic of Nixon, both during and after his presidency. After Nixon's death in 1994, Thompson famously described him in Rolling Stone as a man who "could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time" and said "his casket [should] have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

In 1970, Thompson narrowly lost a bid for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on the "Freak Power" ticket. He ran on a platform promoting decriminalization of drugs and the sale thereof, tearing up the streets and turning them into bike paths, and renaming Aspen, Colorado to "Fat City", amongst other things. The incumbent Republican sheriff against whom he ran had a crew cut, prompting Thompson to shave his head bald and refer to his opposition as "my long-haired opponent."

Later years

Thompson's last book, Kingdom of Fear, is an angry commentary on the passing of the American Century. Thompson also wrote a Web column, "Hey Rube," for ESPN. He had at times also toured on the lecture circuit, once with John Belushi. Another appearance was through cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who based his Doonesbury character Uncle Duke on Thompson, to loud protests from Thompson himself. Similarly, Spider Jerusalem, the gonzo journalist protagonist of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, is (more lovingly) based on Thompson.

In his writing, Thompson liked to employ what he called "action verbs" to comically spin outlandish tales that were completely unbelievable, yet provided a unique viewpoint to accurately describe the underlying reality at hand. Thompson almost always wrote in first person narrative, and his stories became so colorfully contrived that they easily slipped into the realm of fiction; however, the basic framework of the story he told was very often true. In his writing, he cultivated the persona of a dangerously absurd, illegal drug-crazed journalist bent on comic self-destruction.

Thompson was a fan of firearms and was known to keep a keg of gunpowder in his basement.

Thompson was married to Anita Beymuk, his long-time assistant, on 24 April, 2003.

Death in 2005

Thompson died at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, on February 20, 2005 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 67 years old.

Thompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson), and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot. They reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought-out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions.Template:Fn Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at the gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with Thompson when he ended his life.

Funeral plans

Thompson's family and friends are currently trying to arrange for Thompson's ashes to be fired out of a cannon, as he wished. This might take some time, because the cannon he envisioned was to be in the shape of a double-thumbed-fist, 150 feet in length.

According to Marc Williams, pyrotechnic expert and owner of Night Musick Inc. in suburban Denver, it's not uncommon for families to have their loved one's ashes scattered across the sky in a fireworks shell. He said that if he were to arrange the service, he'd probably launch Thompson's cremated remains from a 12-inch-diameter mortar 800 feet into the sky, with a huge secondary blast to scatter them amid a massive colored explosion about 600 feet across. "If you were going to light up a flash-bomb worthy of Hunter S. Thompson, you'd want to make it an earth-shaker."


"If that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off," said Douglas Brinkley, a friend and now the family's spokesman.Template:Fn

Legacy

Famous quotes

A slogan of Thompson's, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," appears as a chapter heading in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He was also quoted as saying, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me".

Thompson identified the death of the American Dream as his "reporter's beat", and covered the subject in one fashion or another throughout his writing. During an interview with salon.com, however, Thompson was asked whether he was not, in fact, the living embodiment of the classic American Dream. He answered the question by first screaming a string of frustrated obscenities and then admitting that, in actuality, he probably was.

Letters

Thompson wrote an incredible amount of letters and personal correspondence throughout his life that have begun to be collected in a series of books called The Fear and Loathing Letters. The first volume, which collects his early letters from 1955-1967, is over 650 pages. Douglas Brinkley, who edits the letter series, said that for every letter included, fifteen were cut.

Thompson’s letter writing style includes all of the flamboyancy he is otherwise known for and were sent to both dear friends and also unsuspecting public officials and reporters. It seems that Thompson’s prime avenue for personal conversation was through his typewriter. Since he was a teenager, Thompson made carbon copies of all his letters, which were almost always typed. Brinkley estimated Thompson’s own archive contains over 20,000 letters.

The last of the 3 planned volumes of Thompson’s letters has yet to be published, but it is perhaps inevitable additional volumes will eventually be posthumously collected and published. Thompson has not written an auto-biography , although 3 biographies have been written about him.

Since his early days in the Air Force, Thompson’s letters have contained comic "asides" to "his biographers" that would presumably be "reading-in" on his collected letters.

Accolades

A new journalism contemporary of Thompson’s, Thomas Wolfe, has called Thompson the greatest American comic writer of the 20th century. By comparison, Mark Twain is often given the 19th century honor.

Hunter Thompson showed up frequently as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury, the Garry Trudeau comic strip.

Movies

The film Where The Buffalo Roam (1980) depicts Thompson's attempts at writing stories for both the Super Bowl and the 1972 U.S. presidential election. It stars Bill Murray as Thompson and Peter Boyle as Thompson's attorney Oscar Acosta, referred to in the movie as Carl Laslow, Esq.

The 1998 film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was directed by Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam, and starred Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo. Thompson received credit as the screenwriter. The film has achieved something of a cult following.

The film Breakfast With Hunter (2003) was directed and edited by Wayne Ewing. It documents Thompson's work on the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his arrest for drunk driving and subsequent fight with the court system.

A new film is currently (2005) in production, based upon Thompson's novel The Rum Diary. Both Depp and Del Toro will be starring in this new Thompson film. Del Toro was supposed to have directed, but he withdrew in January 2004. The director is yet to be announced.

Articles

Scanlan's Monthly

Playboy

Rolling Stone

Cycle World

Bibliography

  • The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel (1959; Simon & Schuster, 1999, ISBN 0684856476)
  • Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York, Random House, 1966; Ballantine Books, 1996, ISBN 0345410084)
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Other American Stories (New York, Random House, 1971; Vintage, 1989, ISBN 0679724192; Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0679785892)
  • Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (San Francisco, Straight Arrow Books, 1973; Warner Books, 1985, ISBN 0446313645)
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York, Summit Books, 1979; Simon & Schuster, 2003, ISBN 0743250451)
  • The Curse of Lono, illustrated by Ralph Steadman (Bantam Books, 1983)
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (New York, Summit Books, 1988; Vintage, 1989, ISBN 0679722378; Simon & Schuster, 2003, ISBN 0743250443)
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (New York, Summit Books, 1990; Pocket, 1991, ISBN 0671743260; Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 2002, ISBN 0743240995)
  • Screwjack and Other Stories. (Santa Barbara, Neville Press, 1991; Simon & Schuster, 2000, ISBN 0684873214)
  • Gonzo Papers, Vol. 4: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie Trapped Like a Rat in Mr. Bill's Neighborhood (New York, Random House, 1994; Ballantine Books, 1995, ISBN 0345396359)
  • The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume I -- The Proud Highway -- Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955 - 1967 (New York, Random House, 1997; Ballantine Books, 1998, ISBN 0345377966)
  • Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist 1968-1976 (Collection of Papers first appeared in Time magazine, 1997; Simon & Schuster, 2001, ISBN 0684873168)
  • Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (Simon & Schuster; 1st Simon edition, November 1, 2003, ISBN 0684873249)
  • Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk (Simon & Schuster, August 11, 2004, ISBN 0684873192)
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