Hunter S.
Thompson
Hunter
Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005) was
a famous American journalist and author, most famous for his novel
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
He is credited as the creator of Gonzo Journalism,
a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the
action to such a degree that they become central figures of their
stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics
and other mind-altering substances, and his iconoclastic contempt
for authority.
Biography
Early Years
A
native of Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee
Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands. He was the first son of
Jack Robert, an insurance adjuster and a U.S. Army veteran who
served in France during World War I, and Virginia Davidson
Ray.
Jack died of
myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, when Hunter was 14
years old, leaving three sons - Hunter, Davison, and James to be
brought up by their mother.
Early Journalism Career
After the his
participation in Air Force, he worked as sports editor for a
newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania before moving to New York
City. There he attended Columbia University's School of General
Studies part-time on the G.I. Bill, taking classes in short-story
writing.
During this time
he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week.
While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
in order to learn about the writing styles of the
authors.
In
1960 Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with
the sporting magazine El Sportivo, which soon folded.
After, Thompson worked as a stringer for the New York Herald
Tribune and a few stateside papers on Caribbean issues. After
returning to the States, Hunter lived in California, working as a
security guard and caretaker at the Big Sur Hot Springs for an
eight-month period in 1961. 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.
During this
period, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and
The Rum Diary, and submitted many short stories to
publishers with little success. From May 1962 to May 1963, Thompson
traveled to South America as a correspondent for a Dow Jones-owned
weekly newspaper, the National Observer.
Birth of
Gonzo
In
1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky Derby Is
Decadent and Depraved. 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 sheer desperation; he was facing a
looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out
of his notebook.
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 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."
Legacy
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, which attempted to break free from the objective
style of mainstream reportage. Thompson almost always wrote in the
first person, while extensively using his own experiences and
emotions to color "the story". 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.
The majority of
Thompson's most popular and acclaimed work appeared within the
pages of Rolling Stone Magazine. 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.
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