A great writer, a great man. His books are a high energy, out-of-bounds ride through Hunter’s internal experience blended with some data from outside. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for a freshman Critical Reading course in 1974 and loved it! Unicyclists who have been to NAUCC or UNICON might get a kick out of his book on the IronMan Triathlon in Hawaii, wherein this hard drinking out of shape journalist considers training just enough to burn through the first 1/8 mile of the run!
He has been immortalized in his books, and 2 movies you might have seen: Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and Where the Buffalo Roam.
The NYTimes called him "the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling of the underbelly of American lifge and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction writing he called “gonzo journalism.”
RIP, Hunter.
Billy
Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists have always known this. Which is not to say that fiction is necessarily ‘more true’ than journalism - or vice versa - but that both ‘fiction’ and ‘journalism’ are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end.
~ ~ Hunter S. Thompson
I guess I’ll reply to this with what I hope is not too disrespectful but is at least honest.
I never read a single word of Thompson’s, never saw a single movie about or inspired by him (that I know of anyway), and have read barely a word about him.
For better or worse, and now I display some of my own prejudices, I never took seriously anything that went by the name “gonzo” or that inspired chronic stoners to take themselves seriously. Many intelligent people I’ve known have loved Thompson’s work, but I never could get past what struck me on the surface as silly and superficial.
Perhaps after the bandwagon passes, I’ll give him a go.
even tho it’s incorrectly attributed, and slightly mis-quoted
this still strikes me as the most Hunter S. Thompsonesque quote
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
i’d like to suggest some of his political pieces for first reads
he did a classic article about a jimmy carter speech at (i think) a labour day event
can anyone remember the name of that article?
i know it’s in ‘Tales From The Shark-hunt’
Steadman’s illustrations appear weekly in The Independent’s saturday magazine.
My favouritest t-shirt with the “when the going gets weird” quote reappeared last week after having been lost for ages and ages which made me happy. It’s being worn as I speak in remembrance of the great chap.
This is a letter that Hunter wrote the day JKF was assassinated in Dallas. This is the first time “fear and loathing” was used, this time to describe his horror of the tradegy.
To William J. Kennedy:
November 22, 1963
Woody Creek
I am tired enough to sleep here in the chair, but I have to be in town at 8:30 when Western Union opens, so what the hell. Besides, I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. Ther is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathing that is on me after todays murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of sphinx - I want to kill because I can’t talk.
I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the “real artists” in the “little magazines” are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think that what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the “little magazines” for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far.
We now enter the era of the shitrain, President Johnson and the hardening of the arteries. Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grashp what Gastby was after. No more of that. You misunderstand it, of course, peeling back only the first and most obvious layer. Take your 'realism" to the garbage dump, Or the “little magazines.” THey are like a man who goes into a phone booth to pull his pod. Nada, nada.
The killlin has put me in a state of shock. The rage is trebled. I was not prepared at the time for the death of hope, but here it is. Ignore it at your peril, I have written Semonin, that cheap bookstore Marxist, that he had better tell his boys to buy bullets. And forget the dialectic. This is the end of reason, the dirtiest hour of our time. I mean to come down from the hills and enter the fray. Tomorrow a cabled job request to The Reporter. Failing that, the Observer, Beyond that, god knows, but it will have to be something. From now until the 1964 electrions every man with balls should be on the firing line. The vote will be the most critical in the history of man. No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. From now on it is dirty pool and judo in the clinches. The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency. They can count me in - I fell ready for a dirty game.
Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short. What, O what, does Eudora Welty have to say? Fuck that crowd. The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand, while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. Ther will have to be somebody to carry the flag.
My concept of the new novel would have fit this situation, but now I see no hope for getting it done if, indeed, andy publishing houses survive the Nazi scramble that is sure to come. HOw could we have known, or even guessed? I think we have come to the point.
Send word, if you still exist.
-HST
i just got around to spending some bookshop vouchers i got for my birthday
i spent some of it on ‘Kingdom of Fear’, a biography written by hunter, about himself
but surely that should be an autobiography? i hear a shrill voice enquire
then, surely, u should be reading Enid Blyton
i ripped thru the intro and ‘author’s note’ over breakfast in a coffeeshop and managed to scare the waitress by guffawing like a maniac, more than once
it seems like fun so far, i’ll let u know how it turns out
to coin a phrase, i’ll
it was every bit as stunning as i’d hoped it would be
i’m about to do a www.bookcrossing.com ‘controlled release’ of the book to a juggling friend of mine in exchange for a bio on Che
but the main reason i dug out this thread is because it’s Hunter’s birthday today
he would’ve been 66
i think we should give him some Karl Rove for his birthday
