Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author born on July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky. He became one of the leading figures of New Journalism, named alongside Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe. Thompson wrote in an era marked by the 1960s counterculture, the Vietnam years, and deep anger at American political power. He made his name by refusing the cool distance expected of reporters. In the style he called “Gonzo,” the writer became part of the story, not just its observer.

Thompson first rose to prominence with Hell’s Angels in 1967. To write it, he lived for a year among the Hells Angels motorcycle club and produced a first-hand account of their lives and experiences. In 1970, his Scanlan’s Monthly article “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” raised his profile as a countercultural figure and helped set the direction for Gonzo journalism. His best-known book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, appeared in 1972 after being serialized in Rolling Stone. In it, he grappled with what he saw as the failure of the 1960s counterculture. The book was adapted loosely in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam and explicitly in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

His thinking was shaped early by hardship, reading, sports, and rebellion. Thompson was the first of three sons of Virginia Davison Ray, a librarian, and Jack Robert Thompson, a public insurance adjuster and World War I veteran. His father died when Thompson was 14, and his mother raised the children while working as a librarian. In school, he joined the Athenaeum Literary Association and contributed to its yearbook, but he was ejected in 1955 for criminal activity. After being charged as an accessory to robbery, he served 31 days in jail and was refused permission to take final exams, preventing his graduation. He then enlisted in the United States Air Force.

In the Air Force, Thompson found his first professional writing work. At Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, he became sports editor of the Command Courier after lying about his experience, traveled with the Eglin Eagles football team, and wrote a sports column for a local newspaper under restrictions that kept his name off it. His commanding officer later recommended him for an early honorable discharge, writing that Thompson was talented but “will not be guided by policy.” That judgment followed him into public life. In 1970, he ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the Freak Power ticket. He later covered George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone, collecting the pieces as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 in 1973.

From the mid-1970s on, Thompson’s output declined as he struggled with fame and substance abuse, though he continued to write. He worked for much of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, and much of his work from 1979 to 1994 was collected in The Gonzo Papers. He also wrote sporadically for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Esquire, and ESPN.com until the end of his life. Thompson was known for alcohol and illegal drug use, a love of firearms, and contempt for authority. After health problems, he fatally shot himself on February 20, 2005, at age 67. Hari Kunzru wrote that Thompson’s true voice was that of an “American moralist,” one who made himself ugly to expose the ugliness he saw around him. That is why his words still carry force: they are loud, reckless, funny, and often aimed at the rot he believed polite language could not touch.