By David Puner, used without permission
Hunter S. Thompson:
AGE: 64 or 66 (b. 7/18/1939 or ’37 (sources differ) in Louisville,KY)
FAMILY: Ex-wife, Sandra (married in 1963– split 1978/79). Son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson.
RESIDENCE: Owl Farm in Woody Creek, CO (near Aspen).
EDUCATION: Public schools in Louisville followed by studying journalism at Columbia University.
BOOKS: Hell’s Angels (1966); Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972); Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973); The Great Shark Hunt (1979); The Curse of Lono (1983); Generation of Swine (1988); Songs of the Doomed (1990); Better Than Sex (1993); The Proud Highway (1997); The Rum Diary (written in 1958, published 1998); Screwjack (written 1991, published 2000); Fear and Loathing in America (2000).
CAREER: Began as a sports writer in Florida; Time, Caribbean correspondent (1959); New York Herald Tribune, Caribbean correspondent (1959-60); National Observer, South American correspondent (1961-63); Nation, West Coast correspondent (1964-66); Ramparts, columnist, 1967-68); Scanlan’s Monthly, columnist, (1969-70); Rolling Stone, national affairs editor (1970-84); High Times, global affairs correspondent (1977-82); San Francisco Examiner, media critic (1985-90); Smart, editor-at-large, (1988—). Freelance political analyst for various European magazines (1988—). Contributor of articles and essays (sometimes under pseudonym Raoul Duke) to Esquire, London Observer, New York Times Magazine, Reporter, Harper’s, and others. Served in U.S. Air Force (1956-58) – wrote for base magazine.
Gonzo in DEVELOPMENT:
Like other New Journalists, HST’s early journalism (1959-65) was fairly conventional. But then he started to go Gonzo…
… The foundation for HST’s leap into Gonzo was his saturation reporting for his book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. He spent a year living and riding with the Angels.
Hell’s Angels is considered by Michael Johnson, the author of a 1971 book on New Journalism to be “a classic example of New Journalistic writing about people of a particular subculture… it came about in large part because of his desire to correct the reportage of the established media, to get close to a way of life and write about it as it really is… Thus, Thompson set out to find the true story of the Angels, propelled by a desire to find out what was really happening in their world, to experience it as much as possible as they did, and then write the story in a style true to his sense of the experience.” (Johnson 131-2)
Tom Wolfe on Hell’s Angels:
“Thompson’s use of the first person – i.e., his use of himself, the reporter, as a character in the story – is quite different from the way he uses the first person later in his Gonzo journalism. Here he uses himself solely to bring out the character of the Angels and the locals.” (Wolfe 340)
HST, from letter to Tom Wolfe, 10/26/1968:
“My king-hell desire, at this point,” is to hear one of your lectures on the New Journalism. I really want to know what it is.” (Thompson-ii 142)
“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (June 1970):
The piece was commissioned by Scanlan’s Monthly (a short-lived sports magazine). When HST’s deadline arrived, he says he was fried: “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.” When the piece was well received, Thompson says, “I thought. . . if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times?” (Mote)
HST biographer Paul Perry writes, “The piece, ‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,’ was published in June 1970. Immediately Hunter started getting letters and phone calls of congratulation on a piece well done. One of those letters came from Bill Cardoza, editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, who considered the piece a breakthrough in journalism. ‘Forget all this shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.’ This was the first time the word ‘Gonzo’ was used in reference to Hunter’s work. By 1970, Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary would include the word ‘Gonzo,’ defining it as: ‘adjective (origin unknown): bizarre, unrestrained, specifically designating a style of personal journalism so characterized.’” (Perry 142-3)
HST letter excerpt to Scanlan’s Monthly editor the day before leaving to write Derby piece: “...The story, as I see it, is mainly in the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horse-shit mentality that surrounds the Derby than in the Derby itself. And—as a human product of that culture/mentality—I think I can see it pretty clear…. I think we’ve stumbled on a good genetic accident…” (Thompson-ii 293)
Scanlan’s initially wanted a photographer to be assigned with Hunter on the Derby piece, “but Hunter hated photographers for the reality they imparted and because they always got in the way.” (Perry 138)
Ralph Steadman, a British illustrator known for his work in The Times (London) and Private Eye magazine (political satire), was a last-minute replacement for another illustrator. Steadman’s “savage” illustrations would help define the “Gonzo look.” (Thompson-ii 295)
As Steadman sketched at the Derby, he would tell HST what he was seeing and HST would take notes. Steadman said of the Derby experience, “I could tell from his notes that he was looking at things through my eyes, which made sense. This was the first time I had ever seen anything like this, so therefore I asked a lot of naïve questions. To him, I must have looked like a new toy.” (Perry 140)
HST wound up liking Steadman. In a letter to a Scanlan’s editor he wrote: “…Dealing with Ralph made the whole rotten trip worthwhile for me, in some kind of odd sense. I liked the bastard immensely, and his awkward sensitivity made me see, once again, some of the rot in this country that I’ve been living with for so long that I could only see it, now, through somebody else’s fresh eye…” (Thompson-ii 304)
Two weeks after the Derby, Thompson had completed the piece. In a letter to his friend, Bill Cardoso (of The Boston Globe), he wrote of the experience: “… I went there to write a strange piece on the spectacle for Scanlan’s Monthly… and the whole scene nearly killed me, along with the British illustrator on his first trip to the U.S… It’s a shitty article, a classic of irresponsible journalism—but to get it done at all I had to be locked in a NY hotel room for 3 days with copyboys collecting each sheet out of the typewriter, as I wrote it, whipping it off on the telecopier to San Francisco where the printer was standing by on overtime. Horrible way to write anything…” (Thompson-ii 295)
The bylines of the Derby piece in Scanlan’s read: “Written under duress by Hunter S. Thompson” and “Sketched with eyebrow pencil and lipstick by Ralph Steadman.” (Thompson-ii 295)
William Kennedy on Derby piece:“The Derby story had pointed the way toward the great mother lode… Hunter had discovered that confounding sums of money could be had by writing what seemed to be journalism, while actually you were developing your fictional oeuvre.” (Thompson-ii xvii)
ON GONZO JOURNALISM:
- Thompson is considered to be the father/inventor of Gonzo Journalism – a branch of New Journalism.
New Journalism refresher: “In addition to the novelists Capote and Mailer, reporters Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Hunter Thompson have experimented with fictional techniques by rebelling against the conventional standards of ‘objective reporting.’ Works by these writers have collectively been labeled ‘new journalism,’ since they have brought to reporting the personal commitment and moral vision frequently found only in fiction. Together these writers have generated a new kind of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction,’ since they combine elements of both genres in a variety of ways.” (Hollowell 11)
- As defined by Tom Wolfe, Gonzo is: “a manic, highly adrenal first-person style in which Thompson’s own emotions continually dominate the story.” (Wolfe 172)
- “This was a series of mad, drug-ridden forays into the heart of complacent America, in a style which indulged in insult and invective, as he chronicled the disillusionment and delirium of the volatile era of the 1960s and the souring of the ‘American dream’.” (Woods)
- “Thompson recorded both the disillusionment and the delirium of a volatile era.” (Peacock)
- Author Jerome Klinkowitz wrote in his 1977 book, The Life of Fiction: “Thompson ‘paraded one of the few original prose styles of recent years,’ a style that indulged in insult and stream-of-invective to an unparalleled degree. He pioneered a new approach to reporting, allowing the story of covering an event to become the central story itself, while never disguising the fact that he was ‘a half-cranked geek journalist caught in the center of the action.’” (Peacock)
- Klinkowitz also stated: “His ‘journalism’ is not in the least irresponsible. On the contrary, in each of his books he’s pointed out the lies and gross distortions of conventional journalism.” (Mote)
- “… Thomspon became the ‘professional wildman’ of the New Journalists, to quote Village Voice contributor Vivian Gornick. He also became a nationally known figure whose work ‘in particular caused currents of envy in the world of the straight journalists, who coveted his freedom from restraint,’ according to an Atlantic essayist. ‘He became a cult figure,’ Peter O. Whitmer wrote in Saturday Review, ‘the outlaw who could drink excessively, drug indulgently, shout abusively, and write insightfully.” (Peacock)
- “Thompson’s ‘Gonzo Journalism’ narratives are first-person accounts in which the author appears as a persona, sometimes Raoul Duke, but more commonly Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a specialist variously in divinity, pharmaceuticals, or reporting. Hellmann described this self-caricature in his book Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. It is ‘a paradox, of compulsive violence and outraged innocence, an emblem of the author’s schizophrenic view of America. . . . But the persona also has a determined belief in the power of good intentions and right methods which runs counter to his violent impulses. Despite the psychotic threatening, his artistic aims include the corrective impulse of satire.’” (Peacock)
- “…spontaneous, go-for-jugular brand of surrealistic reportage…” (Durchholz)
HST on Gonzo Journalism:
“My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing. That way, I felt the eye and the mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer, and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it—or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three.” (Mote)
OTHER NOTES:
On the non-fiction of fiction (interesting, esp. because The Rum Diary was HST’s only novel):
“I intended The Rum Diary to be the great American novel… but in a way this is a journalist route. I couldn’t make up these characters. Everything in here, every line, is taken from a reality.” (Macdonald)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was commissioned as a 300-word caption on a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated. It was first printed in Rolling Stone under HST’s pseudonym: (Uncle) Raoul Duke. Arguably, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is HST’s best known work. (Othitis)
HST has claimed that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is actually a failed experiment in Gonzo journalism because he intended it to be an unedited account of everything he did as it happened – but he rewrote and edited it five times. (gonzo.org)
HST throughout his life, beginning in his childhood has typed other author’s lines (Kerouac, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald (esp. The Great Gatsby)) as writing exercises. Doing this gets him into a rhythm and has taught him a lot about the author’s work. He compares the complexities of different writing styles to music.
“During his stint at Time, Thompson polished his writing skills by typing The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms in their entirety, closely studying their sentence structures.” (Thompson-i 143)
MISC (tie-ins with journalist as cult-figure/pop-icon):
From E. Jean Carroll’s unauthorized biography (1993), on HST’s daily routine (as excerpted from The Observer):
“3pm rise. 3.05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills. 3.45 cocaine. 3.50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill. 4.15 cocaine. 4.16 orange juice, Dunhill. 4.30 cocaine. 4.54 cocaine. 5.05 cocaine…9pm starts snorting cocaine seriously. 10pm drops acid. 11pm Chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30 cocaine, etc., etc…12.05 to 6am Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.”
A 1997 New York Times article describes Owl Farm as “equal parts hippie commune, redneck firing range, rustic hunting lodge and unabashed shrine to the heyday of Hunter S. Thompson, the doctor of gonzo journalism.”
FAMILY: Ex-wife, Sandra (married in 1963– split 1978/79). Son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson.
RESIDENCE: Owl Farm in Woody Creek, CO (near Aspen).
EDUCATION: Public schools in Louisville followed by studying journalism at Columbia University.
BOOKS: Hell’s Angels (1966); Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972); Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973); The Great Shark Hunt (1979); The Curse of Lono (1983); Generation of Swine (1988); Songs of the Doomed (1990); Better Than Sex (1993); The Proud Highway (1997); The Rum Diary (written in 1958, published 1998); Screwjack (written 1991, published 2000); Fear and Loathing in America (2000).
CAREER: Began as a sports writer in Florida; Time, Caribbean correspondent (1959); New York Herald Tribune, Caribbean correspondent (1959-60); National Observer, South American correspondent (1961-63); Nation, West Coast correspondent (1964-66); Ramparts, columnist, 1967-68); Scanlan’s Monthly, columnist, (1969-70); Rolling Stone, national affairs editor (1970-84); High Times, global affairs correspondent (1977-82); San Francisco Examiner, media critic (1985-90); Smart, editor-at-large, (1988—). Freelance political analyst for various European magazines (1988—). Contributor of articles and essays (sometimes under pseudonym Raoul Duke) to Esquire, London Observer, New York Times Magazine, Reporter, Harper’s, and others. Served in U.S. Air Force (1956-58) – wrote for base magazine.
Gonzo in DEVELOPMENT:
Like other New Journalists, HST’s early journalism (1959-65) was fairly conventional. But then he started to go Gonzo…
… The foundation for HST’s leap into Gonzo was his saturation reporting for his book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. He spent a year living and riding with the Angels.
Hell’s Angels is considered by Michael Johnson, the author of a 1971 book on New Journalism to be “a classic example of New Journalistic writing about people of a particular subculture… it came about in large part because of his desire to correct the reportage of the established media, to get close to a way of life and write about it as it really is… Thus, Thompson set out to find the true story of the Angels, propelled by a desire to find out what was really happening in their world, to experience it as much as possible as they did, and then write the story in a style true to his sense of the experience.” (Johnson 131-2)
Tom Wolfe on Hell’s Angels:
“Thompson’s use of the first person – i.e., his use of himself, the reporter, as a character in the story – is quite different from the way he uses the first person later in his Gonzo journalism. Here he uses himself solely to bring out the character of the Angels and the locals.” (Wolfe 340)
HST, from letter to Tom Wolfe, 10/26/1968:
“My king-hell desire, at this point,” is to hear one of your lectures on the New Journalism. I really want to know what it is.” (Thompson-ii 142)
“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (June 1970):
The piece was commissioned by Scanlan’s Monthly (a short-lived sports magazine). When HST’s deadline arrived, he says he was fried: “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.” When the piece was well received, Thompson says, “I thought. . . if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times?” (Mote)
HST biographer Paul Perry writes, “The piece, ‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,’ was published in June 1970. Immediately Hunter started getting letters and phone calls of congratulation on a piece well done. One of those letters came from Bill Cardoza, editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, who considered the piece a breakthrough in journalism. ‘Forget all this shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.’ This was the first time the word ‘Gonzo’ was used in reference to Hunter’s work. By 1970, Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary would include the word ‘Gonzo,’ defining it as: ‘adjective (origin unknown): bizarre, unrestrained, specifically designating a style of personal journalism so characterized.’” (Perry 142-3)
HST letter excerpt to Scanlan’s Monthly editor the day before leaving to write Derby piece: “...The story, as I see it, is mainly in the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horse-shit mentality that surrounds the Derby than in the Derby itself. And—as a human product of that culture/mentality—I think I can see it pretty clear…. I think we’ve stumbled on a good genetic accident…” (Thompson-ii 293)
Scanlan’s initially wanted a photographer to be assigned with Hunter on the Derby piece, “but Hunter hated photographers for the reality they imparted and because they always got in the way.” (Perry 138)
Ralph Steadman, a British illustrator known for his work in The Times (London) and Private Eye magazine (political satire), was a last-minute replacement for another illustrator. Steadman’s “savage” illustrations would help define the “Gonzo look.” (Thompson-ii 295)
As Steadman sketched at the Derby, he would tell HST what he was seeing and HST would take notes. Steadman said of the Derby experience, “I could tell from his notes that he was looking at things through my eyes, which made sense. This was the first time I had ever seen anything like this, so therefore I asked a lot of naïve questions. To him, I must have looked like a new toy.” (Perry 140)
HST wound up liking Steadman. In a letter to a Scanlan’s editor he wrote: “…Dealing with Ralph made the whole rotten trip worthwhile for me, in some kind of odd sense. I liked the bastard immensely, and his awkward sensitivity made me see, once again, some of the rot in this country that I’ve been living with for so long that I could only see it, now, through somebody else’s fresh eye…” (Thompson-ii 304)
Two weeks after the Derby, Thompson had completed the piece. In a letter to his friend, Bill Cardoso (of The Boston Globe), he wrote of the experience: “… I went there to write a strange piece on the spectacle for Scanlan’s Monthly… and the whole scene nearly killed me, along with the British illustrator on his first trip to the U.S… It’s a shitty article, a classic of irresponsible journalism—but to get it done at all I had to be locked in a NY hotel room for 3 days with copyboys collecting each sheet out of the typewriter, as I wrote it, whipping it off on the telecopier to San Francisco where the printer was standing by on overtime. Horrible way to write anything…” (Thompson-ii 295)
The bylines of the Derby piece in Scanlan’s read: “Written under duress by Hunter S. Thompson” and “Sketched with eyebrow pencil and lipstick by Ralph Steadman.” (Thompson-ii 295)
William Kennedy on Derby piece:“The Derby story had pointed the way toward the great mother lode… Hunter had discovered that confounding sums of money could be had by writing what seemed to be journalism, while actually you were developing your fictional oeuvre.” (Thompson-ii xvii)
ON GONZO JOURNALISM:
- Thompson is considered to be the father/inventor of Gonzo Journalism – a branch of New Journalism.
New Journalism refresher: “In addition to the novelists Capote and Mailer, reporters Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Hunter Thompson have experimented with fictional techniques by rebelling against the conventional standards of ‘objective reporting.’ Works by these writers have collectively been labeled ‘new journalism,’ since they have brought to reporting the personal commitment and moral vision frequently found only in fiction. Together these writers have generated a new kind of ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction,’ since they combine elements of both genres in a variety of ways.” (Hollowell 11)
- As defined by Tom Wolfe, Gonzo is: “a manic, highly adrenal first-person style in which Thompson’s own emotions continually dominate the story.” (Wolfe 172)
- “This was a series of mad, drug-ridden forays into the heart of complacent America, in a style which indulged in insult and invective, as he chronicled the disillusionment and delirium of the volatile era of the 1960s and the souring of the ‘American dream’.” (Woods)
- “Thompson recorded both the disillusionment and the delirium of a volatile era.” (Peacock)
- Author Jerome Klinkowitz wrote in his 1977 book, The Life of Fiction: “Thompson ‘paraded one of the few original prose styles of recent years,’ a style that indulged in insult and stream-of-invective to an unparalleled degree. He pioneered a new approach to reporting, allowing the story of covering an event to become the central story itself, while never disguising the fact that he was ‘a half-cranked geek journalist caught in the center of the action.’” (Peacock)
- Klinkowitz also stated: “His ‘journalism’ is not in the least irresponsible. On the contrary, in each of his books he’s pointed out the lies and gross distortions of conventional journalism.” (Mote)
- “… Thomspon became the ‘professional wildman’ of the New Journalists, to quote Village Voice contributor Vivian Gornick. He also became a nationally known figure whose work ‘in particular caused currents of envy in the world of the straight journalists, who coveted his freedom from restraint,’ according to an Atlantic essayist. ‘He became a cult figure,’ Peter O. Whitmer wrote in Saturday Review, ‘the outlaw who could drink excessively, drug indulgently, shout abusively, and write insightfully.” (Peacock)
- “Thompson’s ‘Gonzo Journalism’ narratives are first-person accounts in which the author appears as a persona, sometimes Raoul Duke, but more commonly Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a specialist variously in divinity, pharmaceuticals, or reporting. Hellmann described this self-caricature in his book Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. It is ‘a paradox, of compulsive violence and outraged innocence, an emblem of the author’s schizophrenic view of America. . . . But the persona also has a determined belief in the power of good intentions and right methods which runs counter to his violent impulses. Despite the psychotic threatening, his artistic aims include the corrective impulse of satire.’” (Peacock)
- “…spontaneous, go-for-jugular brand of surrealistic reportage…” (Durchholz)
HST on Gonzo Journalism:
“My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing. That way, I felt the eye and the mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer, and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it—or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three.” (Mote)
OTHER NOTES:
On the non-fiction of fiction (interesting, esp. because The Rum Diary was HST’s only novel):
“I intended The Rum Diary to be the great American novel… but in a way this is a journalist route. I couldn’t make up these characters. Everything in here, every line, is taken from a reality.” (Macdonald)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was commissioned as a 300-word caption on a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated. It was first printed in Rolling Stone under HST’s pseudonym: (Uncle) Raoul Duke. Arguably, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is HST’s best known work. (Othitis)
HST has claimed that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is actually a failed experiment in Gonzo journalism because he intended it to be an unedited account of everything he did as it happened – but he rewrote and edited it five times. (gonzo.org)
HST throughout his life, beginning in his childhood has typed other author’s lines (Kerouac, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald (esp. The Great Gatsby)) as writing exercises. Doing this gets him into a rhythm and has taught him a lot about the author’s work. He compares the complexities of different writing styles to music.
“During his stint at Time, Thompson polished his writing skills by typing The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms in their entirety, closely studying their sentence structures.” (Thompson-i 143)
MISC (tie-ins with journalist as cult-figure/pop-icon):
From E. Jean Carroll’s unauthorized biography (1993), on HST’s daily routine (as excerpted from The Observer):
“3pm rise. 3.05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills. 3.45 cocaine. 3.50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill. 4.15 cocaine. 4.16 orange juice, Dunhill. 4.30 cocaine. 4.54 cocaine. 5.05 cocaine…9pm starts snorting cocaine seriously. 10pm drops acid. 11pm Chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30 cocaine, etc., etc…12.05 to 6am Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.”
A 1997 New York Times article describes Owl Farm as “equal parts hippie commune, redneck firing range, rustic hunting lodge and unabashed shrine to the heyday of Hunter S. Thompson, the doctor of gonzo journalism.”
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