Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born on July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest of three sons of Jack Robert Thompson, an insurance adjuster, and Virginia Ray Davison, a librarian ^[1]. The family lived in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood, comfortable but not wealthy, and the young Thompson grew up reading widely and running with a rough crowd of friends who admired his nerve and his talent for trouble.

His father died of myasthenia gravis in 1952, when Hunter was fourteen. The loss pushed the household into financial strain, and his mother took work at the Louisville Free Public Library to support her sons ^[1]. Thompson's adolescence grew steadily wilder. He was admitted to the Athenaeum Literary Association, a prestigious Louisville literary club, where he wrote for its yearbook and absorbed the work of writers he would later imitate obsessively, typing out pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to feel the rhythm of their sentences ^[2].

In 1955, weeks before his high school graduation, he was arrested as an accessory to robbery and sentenced to sixty days in the Jefferson County Jail. He served about thirty, missed his graduation, and on release enlisted in the United States Air Force ^[1]. The arrest closed one door and opened another: the Air Force assigned him to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where he talked his way into the sports editor job at the base newspaper, the Command Courier, despite having no formal training. It was his first sustained work as a journalist ^[2].

Honorably discharged in 1957, Thompson spent the next several years in the itinerant apprenticeship of a working reporter. He wrote sports for a small paper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, worked briefly as a copy boy at Time in New York (where he was fired), and lost a job at the Middletown Daily Record in upstate New York after kicking a candy machine and arguing with an advertiser ^[2]. He audited courses at Columbia University, lived cheaply in Greenwich Village, and drafted two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, the latter drawn from a stint writing for a sports paper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1960. The Rum Diary would not be published until 1998 ^[3].

The early 1960s took him to South America as a correspondent for the National Observer, a Dow Jones weekly. His dispatches from Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and elsewhere showed a sharp eye and a growing impatience with conventional reporting ^[2]. Back in the United States, he settled in San Francisco just as the counterculture was gathering force, and in 1965 The Nation published his article on the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Publishers came calling within days ^[1].

Thompson spent roughly a year riding with the Angels, drinking with them, and recording their world from the inside, an arrangement that ended when several members beat him badly in 1966. The resulting book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, appeared in 1967 to strong reviews and made his name as a fearless participant-observer ^[3]. He was twenty-nine, and he had found the method that would define him: immersion so complete that the reporter became part of the story.

The style now inseparable from any Hunter S. Thompson biography took shape in June 1970, when Scanlan's Monthly published "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." Facing a deadline he could not meet, Thompson tore pages from his notebook and sent them to New York raw. The piece, a savage first-person portrait of Louisville's Derby crowd illustrated by the Welsh artist Ralph Steadman, prompted the Boston Globe editor Bill Cardoso to call it "pure Gonzo," and the label stuck ^[4]. Gonzo journalism discarded the pretense of objectivity: the writer's perceptions, exaggerations, and even chemical state became part of the record.

His masterpiece followed quickly. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, serialized in Rolling Stone in November 1971 under the byline Raoul Duke and published as a book in 1972, grew out of two magazine assignments in Las Vegas, one covering the Mint 400 motorcycle race and the other a district attorneys' conference on narcotics ^[3]. The book recast those trips as a drug-soaked odyssey in search of the American dream, with Thompson's alter ego Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (based on the Chicano lawyer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta), careening through casinos in a rented convertible. Critics recognized it at once as something new; The New York Times called attention to its ferocious comic energy, and it has remained continuously in print for more than half a century ^[5].

Rolling Stone then made him its national affairs correspondent, and his coverage of the 1972 presidential race, collected as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973), ranks among the most influential campaign books ever written. Thompson openly loathed Richard Nixon, championed George McGovern, and reported the mechanics and cynicism of the campaign with a bluntness the traveling press corps privately admired and publicly could not match ^[4]. Among the achievements that secured his reputation, this run from 1967 to 1973, three books and a stream of magazine work, is the core of the case that Hunter S. Thompson changed American journalism ^[5].

Thompson married Sandra Dawn Conklin in 1963. Their son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, was born in 1964 and later wrote a memoir about their difficult, ultimately reconciled relationship, Stories I Tell Myself (2016) ^[6]. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980. In 2003 Thompson married Anita Bemis, his assistant, who survived him and has managed much of his literary estate ^[1].

From the late 1960s onward his home base was Owl Farm, a compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, near Aspen, which he called his "fortified compound." There he wrote through the night, shot guns on his property, and entertained a rotating cast of friends that included politicians, actors, and fellow writers ^[6]. In 1970 he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County on the Freak Power ticket, campaigning on decriminalizing drugs and renaming Aspen "Fat City" to deter developers. He lost narrowly, and the campaign, chronicled in Rolling Stone, became part of his legend ^[4].

His consumption of alcohol, LSD, cocaine, and other drugs was not a pose; friends and biographers have documented it as a daily reality that increasingly interfered with his ability to finish work ^[2]. He was also, by many accounts, a disciplined stylist beneath the chaos, a writer who revised carefully and knew exactly what effect he wanted. The persona and the craftsman coexisted uneasily for four decades.

After the mid 1970s, Thompson's output slowed. A planned Rolling Stone assignment covering the fall of Saigon in 1975 produced little publishable copy, and an assignment on the Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974 famously ended with him skipping the bout ^[2]. He continued to publish, including The Curse of Lono (1983), a Hawaii travelogue with Ralph Steadman, and four volumes of collected essays and journalism under the series title The Gonzo Papers, beginning with The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 ^[3].

Hollywood kept his fame alive for new generations. Bill Murray played him in Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), and Johnny Depp, who became a close friend, starred in Terry Gilliam's film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and later in The Rum Diary (2011) ^[5]. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau had already immortalized him as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury, a caricature Thompson detested.

In his final years he wrote a sports and politics column, "Hey Rube," for ESPN.com, and published the memoir Kingdom of Fear (2003). His health declined after surgeries on his hip and spine, and he was often in pain. On February 20, 2005, at age sixty-seven, Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Owl Farm in Woody Creek ^[1]. That August, in a ceremony he had planned himself decades earlier and that Depp helped finance, his ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower shaped like a double-thumbed gonzo fist while friends and family watched ^[7].

Anyone asking who was Hunter S. Thompson finds two answers layered together: the outlaw celebrity and the serious innovator. As an innovator, he belongs with Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion in the New Journalism movement of the 1960s, which brought novelistic technique to reporting; but gonzo went further, making the reporter's subjectivity the explicit subject ^[5]. Journalism schools still debate the ethics of his method even as they assign his books. His influence is visible in first-person political writing, in longform magazine voice, and in the confessional register of much online journalism.

His papers and the Owl Farm property remain in the care of his widow, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was included in the Modern Library edition of essential twentieth-century writing on the American experience, a mark of its passage from scandal to canon ^[3]. In Louisville, his hometown has honored him with an official Hunter S. Thompson Day, and Aspen area residents still recall the Freak Power campaign as a genuine chapter in Colorado political history ^[7].

Among the enduring Hunter S. Thompson facts is this: he wrote perhaps the most quoted opening line in postwar American journalism, the Las Vegas book's first sentence about drugs taking hold somewhere around Barstow, and he built a persona so vivid that it eventually competed with the work. The books outlasted the myth. Read today, his best reporting from 1965 to 1973 remains fast, funny, angry, and precise, and it explains why his achievements are still measured against by writers who were born long after Nixon left office ^[4].