RIP Hunter S. Thompson

monkichi · Thu Feb 24, 2005 7:41 am

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=613466

Hunter S. Thompson
Author of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and inventor of 'gonzo' journalism

22 February 2005

Hunter Stockton Thompson, journalist and writer: born Louisville, Kentucky 18 July 1937; twice married (one son); died Woody Creek, Colorado 20 February 2005.

Hunter S. Thompson in 2003 summed up his life thus: "I was a notorious best-selling author of weird and brutal books and also a widely feared newspaper columnist . . . I was also drunk, crazy and heavily armed at all times." He died on Sunday as a result of gunshot wounds, apparently self-inflicted.

Thompson was, in fact, a total paradox. An icon of the counter-culture for his journalism for Rolling Stone magazine - in particular his drug-fuelled odyssey "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", published in book form in 1972 - he was also a stalwart of the National Rifle Association and both began and ended his career as a sports writer. The last piece he filed was for an online sports magazine about a new form of golf he had devised with the film star Bill Murray.

The author of a dozen books, he was best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro starred in a 1998 film version - and the creation of "gonzo" journalism in which the hitherto anonymous reporter moved to the centre-stage of his own story. For that, he has a lot to answer for.

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937, into a middle-class family. His father was an insurance agent who died when Hunter was 14. He had been expected to go to Yale or Harvard but, after his father's death, he went off the rails. By the time he was 18 he had been jailed for his part in a robbery.

Whilst in prison Hunter Thompson took a writing course. When he joined the US Air Force in 1956, he became a sports writer at the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. On his discharge in 1958 he worked as a journalist for a series of small-town newspapers before getting a job in 1959 as Caribbean correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, based in Puerto Rico. His only novel, The Rum Diary, was written at this time, although it wasn't published until 1998. From 1961 to 1963 he worked as South American correspondent for the New York-based National Observer. And in 1963 he married Sandy, the mother of his son, Juan. They were later divorced.

Thompson was always equally interested in politics and sport. He filed his first election report in 1964. However, it was an article for the counter-culture magazine Rolling Stone, published in 1965, about spending time with California's Hell's Angels, that established his reputation. He turned it into a critically hailed book, Hell's Angels: a strange and terrible saga, the following year.

He had a long relationship with Rolling Stone, although he initially considered the San Francisco-based magazine to be staffed by "a bunch of faggots and hippies". He once famously fell out with Rolling Stone's publisher Jann Wenner over expenses for articles that were never actually delivered.

However, the invention of gonzo journalism came about because Thompson was late for a sports deadline for Scanlan's magazine, with a story to write about the Kentucky Derby. He was already heavily into drugs.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he said:

So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.

But instead it seemed to have great appeal - the magazine was inundated with letters praising the article and it was hailed as "a breakthrough in journalism". Thompson compared his experience of the resulting furore as "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids".

At Scanlan's he began working with the British illustrator Ralph Steadman. In 1970 they were assigned to report on the America's Cup in Newport, Rhode Island. The story goes that Thompson gave Steadman psilocybin (magic mushrooms), then rowed him out to the American yacht at night to spray an obscenity on it. When they were spotted, Thompson sent out a distress rocket that set fire to two other yachts.

Thompson was a heavy drug-user and drinker, but he fed all that into his best-known work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", published in Rolling Stone in 1972 with illustration by Steadman. At the centre of the piece was "Dr Thompson", a drug- and alcohol-crazed wild man. The account of this hallucinatory road trip became a counter-culture classic.

Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72 followed in 1973, featuring, among others, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. It became notorious for its brutal opinions. Nixon was, for example, "America's answer to the monstrous Mr Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us."

Thompson's hyperbolic, vitriolic, self-centred writing style influenced - for good or ill - a generation of journalists. He himself said that he was influenced by the solipsistic writings of Jack Kerouac, although Thompson's drug use put him more on a par with William Burroughs.

His heyday was the Seventies when every magazine around wanted to use him. He set up home in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, in a "writer's compound". In 1970 he was almost elected sheriff in Aspen under the Freak Power Party banner but in subsequent decades became increasingly reclusive, surrounded by peacocks and guns. His books were mostly collections of his journalism. They included: The Great Shark Hunt: strange tales from a strange time (1979); The Curse of Lono (illustrated by Ralph Steadman, 1983); Generation of Swine: tales of shame and degradation in the '80s (1988); Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American Dream (1990); Silk Road: thirty-three years in the passing lane (1990); Better than Sex: confessions of a political junkie (1993); and The Proud Highway: the saga of a desperate southern gentleman, 1955-1967 (1997).

Thompson was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury". In 1980 the film Where the Buffalo Roam, based on Thompson's coverage of the Super Bowl and the 1972 presidential elections, had Bill Murray playing the good doctor of gonzo journalism. Later, in 1998, Johnny Depp played him in Terry Gilliam's film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

As the years went on, Thompson's provocative insights into American society and politics sometimes veered into hectoring and invective. However, on occasion, he still kept his bite. In a 1994 Rolling Stone obituary of Richard Nixon he famously described the former President as "a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal."

His life increasingly centred around his writer's compound, surrounded by signs which went from "Keep Out" and "Danger Zone" to "Guns in Constant Use". In 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, while trying to chase a bear off his property. His regime was to stay up all night. He would sleep until 6pm then have a breakfast, according to one visitor, of orange juice, coffee, a half-pint of Chivas Regal, cigarettes, hashish and cocaine. It is not surprising that he was known for his mood swings and unreliability. Even so, he remarried in 2003, to another of his assistants, the 30-year-old Anita. "I just took an immediate liking to her," he said. "As for the age gap, I never really paid much attention to age or other normal conventions."

Even in recent years, his opinions on US politics still mattered. When John Kerry visited Aspen during his presidential campaign last year, he appointed Thompson his "official" host and gave him pride of place in his motorcade. Kerry made a speech in which he jokingly considered making Thompson his Vice-President. For his part, Thompson said: "Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis." His last two books - Kingdom of Fear (2003) and Hey Rube: blood sport, the Bush doctrine and the downward spiral of dumbness (2004) - were both about politics.

But Thompson was ailing. In 2003 he underwent spinal surgery and, later that year, having only just regained the use of his legs, he went to Honolulu, where he had a fall in his hotel room, fracturing his left leg. (His friend the actor Sean Penn sent a private jet to fly him home.) He said that he had felt mortality closing in from the age of 18. "Often. I never figured I would live past 30."

In his prime Thompson was an exhilarating, savage read and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will probably outlast the works of Kerouac that inspired it. His writing came out of a wild confluence of things. As he once said: "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me."

Peter Guttridge

2b · Mon Feb 28, 2005 7:53 am

rip HST

Guest · Tue Mar 01, 2005 6:48 am

he was one of my favourite authors,

TIP HST,

syn