Hunter Stockton Thompson
Stereotypical image of Thompson in public
imagining: sunglasses, cigarette with a
black holder, and male pattern baldness |
| Born: |
July 18 1937(1937--)
  Louisville, Kentucky, USA |
| Died: |
February 20 2005 (aged 67)
 Woody Creek, Colorado, USA |
| Occupation: |
Journalist, author |
| Genres: |
Gonzo journalism |
| Literary movement: |
New Journalism |
| Influences: |
Joseph Conrad, J. P. Donleavy,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Mark Twain |
| Influenced: |
P. J. O'Rourke, Lester Bangs, Cameron Crowe, J. Oliver Johnson, Matt
Taibbi, Tom Wolfe, Todd Williams |
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 –
February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. He is
credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting in which the
reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories.
Biography
Early years
A Louisville, Kentucky native, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands. He was the first son of parents Jack Robert (1893 – July
3, 1952), an insurance adjuster and a U.S. Army veteran who served in France during World War I, and Virginia Davidson Ray (1908 – 1998), a
reference librarian and secretary who, while a student at the University of
Michigan, had joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. Introduced by a mutual friend from Jack's fraternity in 1934, they had married in
1935.[1]
Jack died of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, on July 3, 1952, when Hunter was 14 years old, leaving three sons—Hunter, Davison, and James (1949–1994)—to be brought up by
their mother. Contemporaries described Virginia after Jack's death as a “heavy drinker.”[1]
Interested in sports and athletically inclined from a young age, Thompson joined Louisville’s
Castlewood Athletic Club, a sports club for teenagers that prepared them for high-school sports, where he excelled in
baseball, though he never joined any sports teams in high school. He was constantly in trouble
at school.[1]
Education
Thompson attended first the I.N. Bloom Elementary School, then later Atherton High
School before transferring to Louisville Male High School in 1952
following the death of his father. That same year he was accepted as a member of the Athenaeum Literary Association, a
school-sponsored literary and social club that had been founded at Male High in 1862. Its members at the time were generally
drawn from Louisville’s wealthy upper-class families, and included Porter Bibb, who would later
be the first publisher of Rolling Stone and biographer of broadcasting entrepreneur
Ted Turner. As an Athenaeum member, Thompson contributed articles and helped edit the club’s
yearbook The Spectator; however, the group ejected Thompson from its membership in 1955, citing his legal
problems.[1]
Charged as an accessory to robbery after having been in a car with the person who actually committed the robbery, Thompson was
sentenced to serve 60 days in Kentucky’s Jefferson County Jail. He served 30 days of
his sentence, and joined the U.S. Air Force a week after his release.[1]
Military career
Thompson did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio,
Texas, and later transferred to Scott Air Force Base
in Illinois to study electronics. He attempted to become a
pilot by applying to the Air Force's aviation-cadet program, but was rejected. In 1956 he
transferred to Eglin Air Force Base, near Pensacola, Florida. There he worked in the information-services
department and became the sports editor of the base's newspaper, The Command Courier. In this capacity, he covered the Eglin
Eagles, a base football team that included such future professional stars as
Max McGee, who would years later catch the first touchdown
pass ever thrown in a Super Bowl while playing for the Green Bay Packers, and Zeke Bratkowski, who would later play
for the Packers, Los Angeles Rams, and Chicago
Bears. Thompson traveled with the team, covering its games, around the U.S. In 1957, he also
wrote a sports column for The Playground News, a local newspaper in Fort
Walton Beach, Florida, but wrote it anonymously, as outside employment was against Air Force regulations.[1]
Thompson left the Air Force in 1958 as an Airman First Class, having been
recommended for an early honorable discharge by his commanding officer. In
summary, this airman, although talented will not be guided by policy, Col. William S. Evans, chief of information services
wrote to the Eglin personnel office. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff
members. Thompson claimed in a mock press release he wrote about the end of his duty to have been issued a "totally
unclassifiable" status.[2]
Early journalism career
After the Air Force, he worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore,
PA[3] before moving to
New York City, where he attended Columbia
University's School of General Studies, on part-time basis, taking classes on short-story writing on the GI Bill.[4]
During this time he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week.
While working, he copied F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms, using a typewriter,
saying that he wanted to learn about the writing styles of the authors. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination.[4] Later that year, he worked as a reporter for The
Middletown Daily Record in Upstate New York. He was fired from this job after
damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant who happened to be an advertiser with the
paper.[4]
In 1960 Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with the
sporting magazine El Sportivo, which soon folded. Thompson had first unsuccessfully
applied for a job with the larger English-language daily The San Juan Star, but
while on the island he nevertheless befriended the paper's managing editor, future novelist William Kennedy.[5] After
returning to the States, Hunter lived and worked as a security guard and caretaker at Big Sur
Hot Springs for an eight-month period in 1961, just before it became the Esalen
Institute. While there, he was able to publish his first magazine feature in the nationally-distributed
Rogue magazine on the artisan and
bohemian culture of Big Sur. The article would get him fired from his job as a
caretaker.
During this time period, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and
The Rum Diary, and submitted many fictional short stories to publishers with little success. The Rum Diary, which fictionalized Thompson's
experiences in Puerto Rico, was eventually published in 1998, long after Thompson had
become famous.
From May 1962 to May 1963, Thompson traveled to South America as a correspondent for a
Dow Jones-owned weekly newspaper, the National Observer. In Brazil, he spent several months working also
as a reporter on the Brazil Herald, the country's only English-language daily, published
in Rio de Janeiro. His longtime girlfriend Sandra Dawn Conklin (aka Sandy Conklin
Thompson, now Sondi Wright) later joined him in Rio.
Thompson and Conklin were married on May 19, 1963, shortly after
they returned to the United States. They briefly relocated to Aspen, Colorado, and had
one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, born March 23, 1964. The
couple conceived five more times together. Three of the pregnancies were miscarried, and the
other two pregnancies produced infants who died shortly after birth. After nineteen years together and seventeen years of
marriage, Hunter and Sandy divorced in 1980; the two remained close friends until Thompson's death.
The Thompson family then moved to California, and while living in Glen Ellen,
California, Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an
array of domestic subjects, including a story about his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, in
order to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway's suicide.[6] While working on the story, Thompson symbolically stole a pair of
elk antlers hanging above the front door of Hemingway's cabin. Thompson and the editors at the
Observer eventually had a falling out, and he moved to San Francisco,
California, immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture
that was taking root in the area. About this time he began writing for the Berkeley,
California, underground paper The Spider.[7]
Hells Angels
In 1965, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, offered Thompson the opportunity to write a story based on his experience with the
California-based Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After The Nation published the
article (May 17, 1965), Thompson received several book offers and
spent the next year living and riding with the Hell's Angels. The relationship broke down when the bikers suspected that Thompson
would make money from his writing. The gang demanded a share of the profits and Thompson ended up with a savage beating, or
'stomping' as the Angels referred to it. Random House published the hard cover
Hell's Angels: The Strange and
Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966. A reviewer for The New York
Times praised it as an "angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book," that shows the Hell's Angels "not
so much as dropouts from society but as total misfits, or unfits—emotionally, intellectually and educationally unfit to achieve
the rewards, such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers." The reviewer also praised Thompson as a "spirited,
witty, observant and original writer; his prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust."[8]
Following the success of Hells Angels, Thompson was able to publish articles in a number of well-known magazines during
the late 1960s, including The New York Times Magazine,
Esquire, Pageant, and
others. In the Times Magazine article, published in 1967 shortly before the "Summer of
Love" and entitled The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies, Thompson wrote in-depth about the hippies of San
Francisco, deriding a culture that began to lack the political convictions of the New Left and
the artistic core of the Beats, instead becoming overrun with newcomers lacking any
purpose other than obtaining drugs [9]. It was an
observation on the 60s' counterculture that Thompson would further examine in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other
articles.
In late 1968, Thompson and his family purchased a modest home and property in Woody
Creek, Colorado, a small mountain hamlet outlying Aspen. Thompson would often describe the home where he would reside for
the rest of his life as his "fortified compound", and the family became well-known residents of the small community.
Thompson's letters from 1968 indicate that he planned to write a book called The Joint Chiefs about "the death of the
American dream". This book was never finished, but the theme of the death of the American
dream would be carried over into his later work. [10].
Thompson also signed a deal with Ballantine Books in 1968 to write a satirical book
called The Johnson File about Lyndon Johnson. However, a few weeks after the
contract was signed, Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election in the 1968 election, and the deal was cancelled. [11].
In the late sixties, Thompson also obtained his famous title of "Doctor" from the
Universal Life Church.[12] He would later prefer to be called Dr. Thompson, and his "alter-ego" Raoul Duke called himself a "doctor of journalism".
Middle years
In 1970 Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County,
Colorado, on the "Freak Power" ticket, promoting the decriminalization of drugs (for personal use only, not trafficking,
as he disapproved of profiteering), tearing up the streets and turning them into grassy pedestrian malls, banning any building so
tall as to obscure the view of the mountains, and renaming Aspen, Colorado, "Fat City."
Thompson, having shaved his head, referred to his opponent as "my long-haired opponent", as the incumbent Republican had a crew cut.
With polls actually showing him with a slight lead in the race, Thompson appeared at Rolling
Stone magazine headquarters in San Francisco with a six-pack of beer in hand and declared to editor Jann Wenner that he was about to be elected the next sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, and wished to write about
it.[13] Thus, Thompson's first article in Rolling
Stone was published as The Battle of Aspen with the byline "By: Dr.
Hunter S. Thompson (Candidate for Sheriff)." Despite the publicity, Thompson ended up narrowly losing the election.
Birth of Gonzo
-
Also in 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky
Derby Is Decadent and Depraved for the short-lived new journalism magazine
Scanlan's Monthly. Although it was not widely read at the time, the article is
the first of Thompson's to use techniques of Gonzo journalism, a style he would later
employ in almost every literary endeavor. The manic, first-person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of
Thompson's sheer desperation; he was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook.
Ralph Steadman, who would later collaborate with Thompson on several projects,
contributed expressionist pen and ink illustrations.
The first use of the word Gonzo to describe Thompson's work is credited to the journalist Bill Cardoso. Cardoso had first met Thompson on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968
New Hampshire Primary. In 1970, Cardoso (who, by this time had become the editor
of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine) wrote to Thompson praising the "Kentucky Derby"
piece in Scanlan's Monthly as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Thompson
took to the word right away, and according to illustrator Ralph Steadman said "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo."[14]
Thompson's first published use of the word Gonzo appears in a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American
Dream: "Free Enterprise. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
-
The book for which Thompson gained most of his fame had its genesis during the research for Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, an exposé Thompson was
writing for Rolling Stone on the 1970 killing of the Mexican-American television journalist Ruben Salazar. Salazar
had been shot in the head at close range with a tear gas canister fired by officers
of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department during the
National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam
War. One of Thompson's sources for the story was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent
Mexican-American activist and attorney. Finding it difficult to talk in the racially tense
atmosphere of Los Angeles, Thompson and Acosta decided to travel to
Las Vegas, Nevada, and take advantage of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word photograph caption on the Mint
400 motorcycle race held there.
What was to be a short caption quickly grew into something else entirely. Thompson first submitted to Sports
Illustrated a manuscript of 2,500 words, which was, as he later wrote "aggressively rejected." Rolling Stone publisher
Jann Wenner was said to have liked "the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively
scheduled it for publication — which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it," Thompson later wrote.[15]
The result of the trip to Las Vegas became the 1972 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which first appeared in the
November 1971 issues of Rolling Stone as a two-part series. It is written as a
first-person account by a journalist named Raoul Duke on a trip to Las Vegas with
Dr. Gonzo, his "300-pound Samoan attorney," to cover a
narcotics officers' convention and the "fabulous Mint 400". During the trip, Duke and his
lawyer (always referred to as "my attorney") become sidetracked by a search for the American
dream, with "...two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a
salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers,
laughers... also, a quart of tequila, a quart of
rum, a case of Beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls."
Coming to terms with the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement is a major
theme of the novel, and the book was greeted with considerable critical acclaim,
including being heralded as "by far the best book yet written on the decade of dope" by the New York Times[16] and a
"scorching epochal sensation" by author Tom Wolfe [citation needed]. "The Vegas Book", as Thompson
referred to it, was a mainstream success and the first widely-read work of Thompson's that employed his gonzo journalism
techniques, and the novel introduced his style to the masses.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972
-
Within the next year, Thompson wrote extensively for Rolling Stone while covering the election campaigns of President Richard M.
Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George McGovern. The articles were
soon combined and published as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign
Trail '72. As the title suggests, Thompson spent nearly all of his time traveling the "campaign trail" and his
coverage focuses largely on the Democratic Party's primaries (Nixon, as
an incumbent, performed little campaign work) and its breakdown due to splits between the
different candidates; McGovern was extolled throughout while fellow candidates Ed Muskie
and Hubert Humphrey were ridiculed. As an early supporter of McGovern, it could be
argued that his unflattering coverage of the rival campaigns along with the rapidly expanding circulation of Rolling Stone played a role in the senator's nomination.
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. [He] was an evil man—evil in a way that only those
who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it."[17] The one passion they shared was a love of football, which is discussed in
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.
Thompson was to provide Rolling Stone similar coverage for the 1976 Presidential Campaign that would appear in a book published by the
magazine. Reportedly, as Thompson was waiting for a $75,000 advance cheque to arrive, he learned that Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner had pulled the plug on the endeavor without telling Thompson.[18]
Wenner then asked Thompson to travel to Vietnam to report on what appeared to be the closing
of the Vietnam War. Thompson accepted, and left for Saigon immediately. He arrived with the country in chaos, just as the United States was
preparing to evacuate and other journalists were scrambling to find transportation out of
the region. While there, Thompson learned that Wenner had pulled the plug on this excursion as well, and Thompson found himself
in Vietnam without health insurance or additional financial support. Thompson's story about the fall of Saigon would not be
published in Rolling Stone until ten years later.[19]
These two incidents severely strained the relationship between the author and the magazine, and Thompson would contribute far
less to the publication in future years.
Later years
1980 marked both his divorce from Sandra Conklin and the release of Where the Buffalo Roam, a loose film adaptation of situations from Thompson's early 1970s
work, with Bill Murray starring as the author. After the lukewarm reception of the film,
Thompson temporarily relocated to Hawaii to work on a novel. The Curse of Lono
was a gonzo-style account of a marathon in the state that was extensively illustrated by Ralph
Steadman, first appearing in Running magazine in 1981 as
"The Charge of the Weird Brigade" and before being excerpted in Playboy in
1983.[20]
On July 21, 1981, in Aspen, Colorado, Thompson ran a stop sign at 2 am and began to "rave" at a state trooper. He also refused
to take alcohol tests. Because of his refusal he was detained, although during a trial the drunk-driving charges against the
journalist were dropped because there was no basis for the charges.
In 1983, he covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada but would not discuss these experiences
until the publication of Kingdom of Fear 20 years later. Later that year he
authored a piece for Rolling Stone called "A Dog Took My Place," an exposé of the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce and what he termed the "Palm
Beach lifestyle." The article contained dubious insinuations of bestiality (among
other things) but was considered to be a return to proper form by many.
Shortly thereafter, Thompson accepted an advance to write about "couples pornography" for Playboy. As part of his
research, he spent time at the O'Farrell Theater strip club in San Francisco and his experience there eventually evolved into a full-length nonfiction novel
tentatively titled The Night Manager. Neither the novel nor the article ever materialized, and San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen erroneously reported that Thompson was "working as the O'Farrell's night manager" [citation needed]. By the early 1990s Thompson was
said to be working on a fictional novel called Polo Is My Life, which was briefly excerpted in Rolling Stone in
1994, and which Hunter himself described in 1996 as "...a sex book — you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the
manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he
was in the sex theater in San Francisco".[21] The novel
was slated to be released by Random House in 1999, and was even assigned ISBN 0679406948, but was never actually published.
At the behest of old friend and editor Warren Hinckle, Thompson became a media critic for the San Francisco Examiner from the mid-1980s until the end of that decade.
Thompson continued to contribute irregularly to Rolling Stone. "Fear and Loathing in Elko," published in 1992, was a
well-received fictional rallying cry against Clarence Thomas, while "Mr. Bill's
Neighborhood" was a largely non-fictional account of an interview with Bill Clinton in an
Arkansas diner. Rather than embarking on the campaign trail as he had done in previous presidential elections, Thompson monitored
the proceedings from cable television; Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political
Junkie, his account of the 1992 campaign, is composed of reactionary faxes sent to Rolling Stone. A decade
later, he contributed "Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004" — an account of a road jaunt with John
Kerry during his presidential campaign that would be Thompson's final magazine feature.
Thompson was named a Kentucky Colonel by the Governor of Kentucky in a December 1996 tribute ceremony where he also received keys to the city of Louisville.[22]
The Gonzo Papers
Despite publishing a novel and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the majority of Thompson's literary output after the
late 1970s took the form of a 4-volume series of books called The Gonzo Papers.
Beginning with The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 and ending with
Better Than Sex in 1994, the series is largely a collection of rare
newspaper and magazine pieces from the pre-gonzo period, along with almost all of his Rolling Stone short pieces, excerpts
from the Fear and Loathing... books, and so on.
By the late 1970s Thompson received complaints from critics, fans and friends that he was regurgitating his past glories
without much new on his part;[23] these concerns are
alluded to in the introduction of The Great Shark Hunt, where Thompson
eerily suggested that his "old self" committed suicide.
Perhaps in response to this, as well as the strained relationship with Rolling Stone, and the failure of his marriage,
Thompson became more reclusive after 1980, often retreating to his compound in Woody Creek and rejecting, or refusing to
complete, assignments. Despite the dearth of new material, Wenner kept Thompson on the Rolling Stone masthead as chief of
the "National Affairs Desk," a position he would hold until his death.
Fear and Loathing Redux
However, Thompson's work was popularized again with the 1998 release of the film
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which opened to
considerable fanfare. The novel was reprinted to coincide with the film, and Thompson's work was introduced to a new generation
of readers.
Soon thereafter, Thompson's "long lost" novel The Rum Diary was
published, as were the first two volumes of his collected letters, which were greeted with critical
acclaim.
Thompson's next, and penultimate, collection, Kingdom of Fear, was a
combination of new material, selected newspaper clippings, and some older works. Released in 2003, it was perceived by critics to
be an angry, vitriolic commentary on the passing of the American Century and the state
of affairs after the September 2001 attacks.
Hunter married Anita Bejmuk, his long-time assistant, on April 24, 2003.
Ultimately, Thompson ended his journalism career in the same way it had begun: writing about sports. Thompson penned a weekly
column called "Hey, Rube" for ESPN.com's "Page 2". The column ran from 2000 to shortly before his death in 2005. Simon & Schuster bundled many of the columns from the first few years and released it in
mid-2004 as Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness -
Modern History from the Sports Desk.
Death
Thompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" known as "Owl Farm" in Woody
Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20,
2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
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, though the gunshot was
mistaken for a book falling, and so they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him: "Winkel
Thompson continued playing 20 questions with Will, Juan Thompson continued taking a photo." Thompson was sitting at his
typewriter with the word "counselor" written in the center of the page.[24]
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. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at a gym at the time of her husband's
death, was on the phone with Thompson when he ended his life.
What family and police describe as a suicide note was delivered to his wife 4 days before his death and later published by
Rolling Stone Magazine. Entitled "Football Season Is Over",[25] it read:
- "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I
needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This
won't hurt"
Artist and friend Ralph Steadman wrote:
- "...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I
don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his
writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you,
well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell — rest assured he will check out them both, find out which
one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and
Peacocks..."[26]
Funeral
On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design
(in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, known to be the song most
respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would
not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable
permanent location can be found. According to widow Anita Thompson, the actor Johnny Depp, a
close friend of Thompson (and portrayer of Raoul Duke, Thompson's fictional alter ego, in
the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), financed the funeral. Depp told the
Associated Press, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I
just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."[27]
Other famous attendees at the funeral included U.S. Senator John
Kerry and former U.S. Senator George McGovern; 60
Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley; actors Bill
Murray (who portrayed Hunter S. Thompson in the movie Where the Buffalo
Roam), Sean Penn and Josh Hartnett; singers
Lyle Lovett and John Oates, The Poet Trip Lucid; and
numerous other friends. An estimated 280 people attended the funeral.
The plans for this impressive monument were initially drawn by Thompson and Ralph
Steadman and were shown as part of an Omnibus program on the
BBC entitled Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision (1978). It is included as a special feature on
the second disc of the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD release of Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas (labeled on the DVD as "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood"). The video footage of
Steadman and Thompson drawing the plans and outdoor footage showing where he wanted the cannon constructed were played prior to
the unveiling of his cannon at the funeral.
Douglas Brinkley, a friend and now the family's spokesman, said of the ceremony: "If
that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off."[28]
Legacy
Writing style
-
Thompson is often credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of writing
that blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. His work and style are considered to be a major part of the
New Journalism literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to break free
from the purely objectivist style of mainstream reportage of the time. Thompson almost always wrote in the first person, while extensively using his own experiences and emotions to color "the story" he
was trying to follow. His writing aimed to be humorous, colorful, and bizarre, and he often exaggerated events to be more
entertaining.
The term Gonzo has since been applied in kind to numerous other forms of highly subjective
artistic expression.
Despite his having personally described his work as "Gonzo," it fell to later observers to describe more precisely what the
phrase actually meant. While Thompson's approach clearly involved injecting himself as a participant in the events of the
narrative, it also involved adding invented, metaphoric elements, thus creating, for the uninitiated reader, a seemingly
confusing amalgam of facts and fiction notable for the deliberately blurred lines between one and the other. Thompson, in a 1974
Interview in Playboy Magazine addressed the issue himself, saying "Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay
Talese, I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They’re both much better reporters than I am, but then, I don’t think of
myself as a reporter." Tom Wolfe would later describe Thompson's style as "...part journalism
and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric." [29]
The majority of Thompson's most popular and acclaimed work appeared within the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine. Along
with Joe Eszterhas and David Felton, Thompson was
instrumental in expanding the focus of the magazine past music criticism; indeed, Thompson was the only staff writer of the epoch
never to contribute a music feature to the magazine. Nevertheless, his articles were always peppered with a wide array of pop
music references ranging from Howlin' Wolf to Lou Reed.
Armed with early fax machines wherever he went, he became notorious for haphazardly sending
sometimes illegible material to the magazine's San Francisco offices immediately as an issue was about to go to press.
Robert Love, Thompson's editor at Rolling Stone of 23 years, wrote that "the dividing line between fact and fancy
rarely blurred, and we didn’t always use italics or some other typographical device to indicate the lurch into the fabulous. But
if there were living, identifiable humans in a scene, we took certain steps....Hunter was close friends with many prominent
Democrats, veterans of the ten or more presidential campaigns he covered, so when in doubt, we’d call the press secretary.
'People will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,' he once said, and he was right."
Discerning the line between the fact and the fiction of Thompson's work presented a practical problem for editors and
fact-checkers of his work. Love called fact-checking Thompson's work "one of the sketchiest occupations ever created in the
publishing world," and "for the first-timer ... a trip through a journalistic fun house, where you didn’t know what was real and
what wasn’t. You knew you had better learn enough about the subject at hand to know when the riff began and reality ended. Hunter
was a stickler for numbers, for details like gross weight and model numbers, for lyrics and caliber, and there was no faking
it."[30]
Persona
-
Thompson often used a blend of fiction and fact when portraying himself in his writing as well, sometimes using the name
Raoul Duke as an author surrogate whom he generally
described as a callous, erratic, self-destructive journalist who constantly drank alcohol and took hallucinogenic drugs.
Fantasizing about causing bodily harm to others was also a characteristic in his work and according to the book "Hunter" by E.
Jean Carrol, he would often deliver anecdotes about threatening to rape prostitutes, which also could have been jokes and just
another example of his brand of humor.
A number of critics have commented that as he grew older the line that distinguished Thompson from his literary self became
increasingly blurred.[31][32][33]
Thompson himself admitted during a 1978 BBC interview that he sometimes felt pressured to live up to the fictional self that he
had created, adding "I'm never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often, they conflict - most often, as a matter of
fact. ...I'm leading a normal life and right along side me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more
and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I'm not
sure who to be." [34]
Thompson's writing style and eccentric persona gave him a cult following in both
literary and drug circles, and his cult status expanded into broader areas after being twice portrayed in major motion pictures.
Hence, both his writing style and persona have been widely imitated, and his likeness has even become a popular costume choice
for Halloween.[35]
Political beliefs
Thompson's early letters to friends suggest an interest in Ayn Rand's Objectivism, but he later moved radically away from Rand's version of politics and instead
embraced a combination of libertarian, anarchist, and
socialist views. In the documentary "Breakfast With
Hunter," Thompson can be seen in several scenes wearing different Che Guevara
t-shirts, while his son Juan Thompson acknowledges that his father had "a perverse resistance to security and predictability,
and a deliberate disregard for propriety." [citation needed]
Thompson's official biographer and longtime friend Douglas Brinkley said:
- "He's both a kind of old-fashioned believer in democratic virtues, but also an anarchist. There's always that unpredictable
element with him. In any given situation, as soon as he feels there's a system closing in, he'll destroy it" [citation needed].
Hunter Thompson was a passionate proponent of the right
to bear arms and privacy rights [36]. A member of the National Rifle Association,[37] Thompson was also co-creator of "The Fourth Amendment Foundation", an organization to assist
victims in defending themselves against unwarranted search and seizure [38].
Part of his work with The Fourth Amendment Foundation centered around support of Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman who was
sentenced for life in 1997 under felony-murder charges for the death of police officer Bruce VanderJagt, despite contradictory
statements and dubious evidence. Thompson organized rallies, provided legal support, and co-wrote an article in the June 2004
issue of Vanity Fair, outlining the case. The Colorado Supreme Court eventually
overturned Auman's sentence in March of 2005, shortly after Thompson's death, and Auman is now free. Auman's supporters claim
Thompson's support and publicity resulted in the successful appeal. [39].
Thompson was a firearms and explosives enthusiast (in his writing and in real life) and owned
a vast collection of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and various automatic and semi-automatic weapons, along with numerous forms of
gaseous crowd control and many other homemade devices.
Thompson was also an ardent supporter of drug legalization and became known for his less-than-shy accounts of his own drug
usage. He was an early supporter of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and served on the group's advisory board for over 30 years until his death
[40]. He told an interviewer in 1997 that drugs should be
legalized "Across the board. It might be a little rough on some people for a while, but I think it's the only way to deal with
drugs. Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich".[41]
After the September 11th, 2001 attacks, Thompson voiced skepticism
regarding the "official story" on who was responsible for the attacks, suggesting to several interviewers that it may have been
conducted by the U.S. Government or with the government's
assistance.[42][43] In 2002, Thompson told a radio show host "...you sort of wonder when something
like that happens, Well who stands to benefit? Who had the opportunity and the motive? You just kind of look at these basic
things [...] I saw that the US government was going to benefit, and the White House people, the Republican administration to take
the mind of the public off of the crashing economy. [...] And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well in the White House
and you know, campaigns and I've known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the
news or whatever event, is never really what happened."[44]
In 2004 Thompson, regarding politics, wrote: "Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for —
but if he were running for president this year against the evil
