Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937–2005) was born on 18 July 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest of three sons in a middle-class family that fell apart when his father died in 1952. His mother became an alcoholic; Thompson became a juvenile delinquent. He was arrested for robbery as a teenager and given the choice of jail or the Air Force. He chose the Air Force, where he began writing — sports columns for the base newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The military discharged him early, noting that “this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy.”

Life and Career

Thompson worked as a journalist in New York, Puerto Rico, and South America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for small newspapers and freelancing without much success. His breakthrough came with Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967), for which he spent a year riding with the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels. The book — part embedded journalism, part personal adventure, ending with Thompson being beaten nearly to death by the gang — established his method: total immersion, with the reporter’s experience inseparable from the story.

The piece that invented Gonzo journalism was “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” published in Scanlan’s Monthly in 1970 and illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who would become Thompson’s lifelong artistic collaborator. Thompson, who had missed his deadline and was sending raw notes and fragments by telecopier, discovered that the chaotic, unedited, first-person style was more powerful than polished reportage.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971, serialised in Rolling Stone; published as a book in 1972) is his masterpiece. Thompson — thinly disguised as Raoul Duke — and his Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo descend on Las Vegas in a rented red convertible, loaded 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 proceed to demolish every convention of journalism, decency, and hotel management. The book is at once a drug comedy, an elegy for the death of the 1960s counterculture, and a devastating indictment of the American Dream.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973) is the finest piece of American political journalism since Theodore White’s Making of the President books — and its opposite. Thompson covered the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone with a ferocity and irreverence that made his dispatches essential reading. His description of Hubert Humphrey as a “treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler” and his assessment of Nixon set a standard for political invective that has never been matched.

Thompson’s later career was marked by declining output, increasing substance abuse, and the growing dominance of his public persona over his writing. The Great Shark Hunt (1979) collected his best journalism. The Curse of Lono (1983), Generation of Swine (1988), and Songs of the Doomed (1990) had brilliant passages but were increasingly repetitive. The Rum Diary, a novel written in the early 1960s, was finally published in 1998.

He shot himself on 20 February 2005 at Owl Farm, his compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. His ashes were fired from a cannon in a ceremony organised by Johnny Depp.

Major Works and Themes

Thompson’s great subject is the death of the American Dream — the promise of freedom, justice, and possibility that he believed had been betrayed by the forces of greed, cowardice, and authoritarianism. His work is powered by moral outrage expressed through savage comedy. Beneath the drugs, the guns, and the baroque excess, Thompson was a moralist who believed in the Constitution, despised Nixon, and mourned the failure of the 1960s to deliver on its promises.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) works on multiple levels: as picaresque comedy, as drug literature, as cultural criticism, and as a lament for a generation that “had all the momentum” and blew it. The “wave speech” — Thompson’s vision of the high-water mark of the counterculture — is one of the great passages in American prose.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Thompson was dismissed by some critics as a self-indulgent showman, but the best assessments recognise him as a major American writer whose innovations in nonfiction were as significant as Capote’s or Mailer’s. Tom Wolfe placed him in the first rank of the New Journalists. His influence on subsequent generations of journalists and writers — from P.J. O’Rourke to Matt Taibbi — is enormous.

Key Works

• Hell’s Angels (1967)
• 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)
• The Rum Diary (1998)
• Kingdom of Fear (2003)

Collecting Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson is one of the most actively collected American nonfiction writers, with a passionate following among collectors of New Journalism, counterculture material, and American first editions.

Hell’s Angels (1967, Random House, New York) is his first book and the foundation of a Thompson collection. First editions in the black-and-white photographic dust jacket bring $1,000–$4,000 in fine condition. The jacket is fragile and frequently chipped; clean copies are scarce.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972, Random House, New York) is the supreme prize. The first edition features Ralph Steadman’s iconic cover illustration. Fine copies in the jacket bring $2,000–$8,000. The book was heavily read and frequently damaged; truly fine copies are rare. Signed copies command substantial premiums — $5,000–$15,000 — as Thompson was an erratic signer who sometimes defaced books with drawings, stamps, and cryptic inscriptions.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (1973, Straight Arrow Books, San Francisco) is the most desirable of his political titles, at $500–$2,000 in the jacket.

Thompson’s signatures and inscriptions are highly individual — he used rubber stamps, drew his Gonzo fist logo, and frequently added profane or eccentric inscriptions. This idiosyncrasy makes Thompson material instantly recognisable and highly collectible. His correspondence, manuscripts, and ephemera are held principally by the Thompson Archive at the Woody Creek residence and at various institutional collections.