Identified by none other than Tom Wolfe as part of a cadre of feature writers and reporters experimenting with a fresh approach to literary nonfiction known as the “new journalism” in the 1960s and 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson’s career in the new milieu began when he wrote his first book: Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.
A bright and charismatic youth, Hunter Stockton Thompson was also a hellion with a propensity for insubordination: a criminal in training. If I didn’t know better, I would assume he attended Catholic schools. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, his mother was a librarian and his father was an insurance adjuster.
His father died when Thompson was 14 years old from a rare disease, so he and his brothers helped his mother make ends meet. A lifelong hooligan with a penchant for shenanigans, Thompson was a lightning rod for trouble and the scourge of the block. Parents feared him and most forbade their kids from associating with him.
“He always had that charisma,” noted his first wife, Sandy, in the William McKeen biography on Thompson. Even as a child, he could work a room. Thompson could render grown-ups mute with his powerful personality. “He was the most charismatic leader I’ve ever known,” said childhood friend Gerald Tyrrell.
Juvenile delinquent? Yes. Heavy drinker? Certainly. But he was also a voracious reader. He admired the likes of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and later, Jack Kerouac, though like me, Thompson believed that Kerouac’s On the Road was the Beat Generation author’s only true masterpiece.
He was, in short, a charming and well-read trouble maker. After a litany of petty offenses, the law finally caught up with young Thompson, and a judge sentenced him to jail time. He was mortified. As with many errant youths, his incarceration led to a stint in the military, where he discovered journalism.
“I look back on my youth with great fondness,” he later wrote, “but I would not recommend it as a working model for others.” Joining the U.S. Air Force, he was initially pegged as an electronics technician, but he resisted and finagled his way onto the staff of the Command Courier, the base newspaper, as a sportswriter.
The position allowed Thompson to be as close as he could come to life as a civilian, and he learned on the job. The writing part came easy for him. His role as a journalist would give him the freedom to determine his own schedule. No need to wake for reveille and jump when his drill sergeant barked.
Nonetheless, he eventually found trouble again: drinking, carousing and insubordination. Capable of speaking volumes without even opening his mouth, his smirk dripped with condescension. Elvis would have admired his sneer. The Air Force wanted him out as soon as possible. He escaped with an honorable discharge.
His brief journalism career in the military led to a number of journalistic pursuits after his discharge. After working as a sports editor at the Jersey Shore Herald in Pennsylvania, he labored at short stints in New York at The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Telegram, the Journal, the Daily News, and the Mirror.
Eventually unemployed and restless, Thompson flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he cobbled an existence as a stringer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Milwaukee Journal and other newspapers. He also began writing a novel drawn from his months in Puerto Rico: The Rum Diary.
Other gigs as a correspondent followed: Rogue, the National Observer, the Nation and Scanlan’s Monthly. Thompson eventually relocated to San Francisco to cover the “action” heating up in those parts, specifically, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Hell’s Angels.
Ultimately landing at Rolling Stone magazine, a modest start-up publication founded by Jann Wenner in 1967, Thompson’s career started to take off. Basically a rock ‘n’ roll magazine when he first arrived in 1970, Thompson believed Rolling Stone and its national audience would make a great platform for his work.
It was during these years that he began developing his own unique style. Like Hemingway, Thompson referred to himself in the third person and emphasized his proximity to the action. Like Kerouac, he used a pseudonym and featured a companion, and in many cases, reverted to standard feature writing techniques in storytelling.
In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the narrator was Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and his accomplice was Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson adopted Raoul Duke as a pseudonym and his partner-in-crime was Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Zeta Acosta), whom Duke referred to as “my attorney.”
His approach? A manic style with Thompson’s own emotions dominating the story. His stories began as routine magazine assignments that ended up as something else. His comic approach led to his longest piece to date in 1971: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
Following publication as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman for Rolling Stone, Random House published a hardcover edition, along with Steadman’s illustrations, in 1972. Though panned by many critics, book sales went through the roof. Wolfe described it as a “scorching epochal sensation.”
As college students, we devoured the tome, along with others in the new genre, with unbridled enthusiasm. The gist: journalist Raoul Duke and his accomplice, Dr. Gonzo, arrive in Las Vegas to cover the Mint 500 motorcycle race and the National District Attorneys Association Conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs.
Hailed by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy as “a classic of our time,” The New York Times called it “by far the best book yet on the decade of dope” and “a custom-crafted study of paranoia, a spew from the 1960s and -- in all its hysteria, insolence, insult and rot -- a desperate and important book.”
The book spawned newfound celebrity for Thompson. Tom Wolfe urged the newly dubbed “gonzo journalist” to join the speaking circuit. “Lecturing is easy, lucrative and a nice ego melon,” said Wolfe. Besides, universities were clamoring for Thompson as an on-campus speaker. He visited Eugene three times.
In 1977, his first appearance at the University of Oregon’s Erb Memorial Union Ballroom sold out quickly, but I secured a ticket, arrived early and sat up front. Calling his talk a “speech” would be inaccurate. His “modus operandi” was correctly portrayed in “Where the Buffalo Roam” starring Bill Murray as Thompson.
He would arrive late, usually at least an hour after the scheduled start time. Walking on stage to thundering applause, he had no prepared text, and announced he would dispense with his opening remarks and conduct a question-and-answer session while consuming a tumbler of Wild Turkey or Chivas Regal.
In 1984, he was enlisted by the EMU Cultural Forum, a student collective, to appear at venerable McArthur Court, the UO basketball arena, on campus. This time I was able to get even closer posing as a photojournalist. Several of the images I captured were legitimate keepers. I had several framed for posterity.
In the early ‘90s, Thompson returned to Eugene one last time: this one at the convention center. After attending the Duck-ASU basketball, my accomplice, Luis, and I proceeded to witness another round with Hunter S. Thompson, or Duke, as he came to be known. I brought a framed picture I shot in 1984 for his signature.
Waiting for an audience, I arrived at his desk and asked for his autograph on the framed picture I shot in 1984. He examined the image and showed it to his bodyguard, commenting: “How about that? Reminds me of the old days.” He then gave it to his cohort saying, “Put it with the other stuff.” Just like that, he absconded my photo.
Hastily, I gave him my Duck basketball ticket for an autograph, which he signed, and then moved to the next person in line. I was pissed. Luis and I stalked Kesey’s bus, where Thompson and Kesey had retreated after the show, assuming they would adjourn to the Vet’s Club, an old-timey bar, as he had done on previous trips.
We waited and waited and waited, probably well over an hour. Finally, the bus started to make an exit. “Let’s roll,” I said to Luis. Tailing the bus would be no problem, we thought. But instead of heading toward the Vet’s Club, they veered toward the I-105, clearly bound for Kesey’s farm near Pleasant Hill.
Upset and miffed, I stewed about the theft for about 24 hours until a friend and fellow Duke admirer commented, “You should be proud that he thought enough of the picture to steal it right to your face.” After pondering the notion for a moment, I had a turnabout: “You know,” I responded, “you’re right.” So I have that going for me.
After Vegas, he wrote another series of articles compiled in a book chronicling the 1972 presidential election: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Frank Mankiewicz, the campaign manager for Democratic candidate George McGovern, would later call the book “the least factual (but) most accurate account” of the campaign.
Thompson later published a number of books, some revisiting old stories from his extensive freelance career, but none achieved the acclaim he had received from Vegas and Campaign Trail ’72. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after experiencing a series of health problems at age 67 in 2005.
Thompson left quotable quotes: “Buy the ticket, take the ride. If it gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well, maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion.” And, “The edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
Then there’s this, from a purportedly official, but more likely fraudulent, news release issued by the Office of Information Service at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida upon Thompson’s discharge from the service: “I’ll never understand how he got this discharge,” Thurd went on to say. “It’s terrifying -- simply terrifying.”
