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Feb. 20, 2006, 11:22 a.m., Korea Standard Time Hunter Thompson's widow offers photo to fans The Associated Press Feb. 20, 2006  "The widow of Hunter S. Thompson said she would let fans download a rarely seen photo of the gonzo journalist posted to his Web site to mark the anniversary of his death. "Hunter S. Thompson was 67 when he shot himself to death Feb. 20, 2005, in his home in Woody Creek, apparently despondent over health problems. "Anita Thompson said she took the photo at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, when her husband had friends over as he was writing one of his columns. "He has a special look in his eye that he had once in while when he was up to something but was totally at peace," she said. 'I've taken thousands of pictures of him, but this one is my favorite. And nobody has seen it.' "Anita Thompson said she is still working on organizing a symposium on her husband for the summer in either Aspen or San Francisco." The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight Reviewed by Noel Murray Onion A/V Club Dec. 21, 2005 Journalists don't have many heroes, because the profession is anonymous by design, and even in journalism schools, the names of the best-known reporters get used as cautionary examples. ("We don't need any Tom Wolfes in this class.") Still, the names alone make astute students sit upright. Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and their contemporaries changed what a reporter can be. In Marc Weingarten's book The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight, those names pop up early and often, along with the names behind the names: Truman Capote, Lillian Ross, John Hersey, George Orwell, and all the way back to Charles Dickens. Weingarten is after nothing less than an all-encompassing salute to exemplary non-fiction.  As such, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight is disappointing only in that it's so short. A cursory glance at the index reveals names that are either missing or under-represented: David Halberstam, George Plimpton, Hugh Hefner, and even new journalism-influenced critics like Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs. Instead, Weingarten focuses on a few of new journalism's biggest stars and most important articles, as well as tracing the rise and fall of the zeitgeist-capturing magazines Esquire and New York. Gang doesn't contain much new about how Thompson wrote Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, or how Wolfe enraged New York society with pieces like "Radical Chic" and the New Yorker-bashing "Tiny Mummies." But Weingarten puts both those writers into a larger context, considering what it was like for them to file complex, literary stories on deadline while their rivals were challenging them with their own work, and while the shifting fortunes of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon's presidency were making their words look like prophecy.Weingarten sounds a few cautionary notes, making a point of describing the old guard's reaction to all the new techniques of compositing, interior monologues, and satire—all of which sometimes came at the expense of facts. Gang ends in the mid-'70s after New York reporter Gail Sheehy gets skewered for inventing characters in her story about the city's prostitution rackets; had Weingarten gone on for another 300 pages, he could've roped in the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair scandals, not to mention the Orwellian "we report, you decide" tactics of Fox News. But too much dirt would muddy up the book's honorable goal of remembering a time when magazine journalism was as entertaining, artful, and important as any novel. If read by the right people, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight might inspire a new generation of journalism students to irritate their professors. Hunter S. Thompson's last blast By Marc Mohan The Oregonian Dec. 16, 2005 If, in fact, it really is better to burn out than to fade away, then it stands to reason it's even better to have your ashes shot out of a 150-foot-tall cannon in the middle of natural splendor. At least, that was Hunter S. Thompson's thinking. The gonzo journalist left specific instructions for the disposal of his remains, before taking his own life earlier this year. The realization of those plans is captured in the hourlong documentary "When I Die."  Director Wayne Ewing, who also made the intimate, entertaining portrait "Breakfast With Hunter," benefits from unfettered access to a process that was kept largely under wraps. The film opens with footage from 1978 in which Thompson describes the tower from which he wants his remains ejected: it should be topped by a gigantic rendition of a favorite image of his, a clenched fist with two thumbs.Funded by actor Johnny Depp, the construction of this monument is a significant undertaking, on the scale of a major Hollywood production. There's some amusing culture clash as the Los Angeles contingent of event planners and producers interact with the local authority (such as it is), the Woody Creek Caucus. The documentary feels at times like a morbid making-of-a-movie documentary, "Project: Greenlight" crossed with "Six Feet Under," but the overriding spirit of remembrance for the iconoclastic Thompson keeps it grounded. As spectacular as this final sendoff is, "When I Die" features near its finale the most heartfelt reminiscence of Thompson, and it comes from an entirely expected source: his favorite bartender at the Woody Creek Tavern. Thompson cronies sign book deal By John Colson Aspen Times Dec. 8, 2005 As the enduring legend of Hunter S. Thompson's life and reactions to his death continue to reverberate around the world, two of the late writer's close friends have signed a deal to write a book of reminiscences based on their memories and those of others in the Aspen area. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis and local artist Michael Cleverly have reached an agreement with the Harper Entertainment/William Morrow publishing firm for a book titled "The Kitchen Readings - Hunter Thompson in Woody Creek," to be published in 2007. According to a blurb on the "Deals" page of publishersweekly.com, "This isn't the first deal related to Hunter S. Thompson since his suicide in February, but it is the first book that promises to bring readers right into Thompson's living room - or kitchen, as it were. [Braudis and Cleverly], two close Thompson buddies who logged many hours in the kitchen of Owl Farm, will reveal several decades' worth of up-close-and-personal anecdotes ..." Cleverly, reached at his home just a mile or so above Owl Farm on Woody Creek Road, said the book is the brainchild of both him and Braudis. "Bob and I have been joking for years about writing a book when Hunter was gone. We were joking because we were dead certain he was going to outlive both of us," Cleverly said. But after Thompson shot and killed himself in February, Cleverly said, the topic of a collaboration on a book took a more serious turn. The two "cranked out a few sample chapters" and sent them to 20 publishers, receiving 19 rejections before the proposal was accepted, a deal was made with a publisher and a cash advance was promised. Cleverly called the cash advance "niggardly" but declined to give a specific dollar amount. "If you take what I was hoping for and slash a zero off the end, there you have it," Cleverly said. He said he and Braudis will be sharing the proceeds from the deal, including a percentage of the ultimate sales. Braudis said the proceeds from the book would not allow him to quit his day job. "I'm going to be writing at night and on the weekends. It'll be a sidelight, and it'll be fun... this'll be a growth experience." With no experience at writing beyond "college papers and police reports, and a few magazine articles," Braudis said he is counting on Cleverly's abilities, both as a writer and as an artist and thus better used to selling creative products to corporate buyers. "I believe Cleverly (who is a regular columnist for the Aspen Times Weekly) has a command of the language equal to most writers," Braudis said. Braudis said he wanted to be a part of the project "because I have a lot of stories about Hunter and considered him a very good friend and in many ways a political genius." The two said they will be including their own reminiscences along with the outcomes of interviews with some of the Good Doctor's friends in the Aspen area and farther afield. "It's about friendship, as far as I'm concerned," Cleverly said of the underlying theme of the book. The book is due out in 2007, and Cleverly said he hopes to have the final draft of the work finished in "about six months after signing the contract," which is expected to happen in a month or more. The contract, according to both writers, calls for a book that is 75,000 words in length. And since the two sent in about 15,000 words in their sample chapters, Cleverly said with confidence, "the thing is about one-fifth done already." Rolling Stone to Publish Thompson Note The Associated Press Sept. 8, 2005 Rolling Stone, the magazine that was home for years to Hunter S. Thompson, will publish a note written by the gonzo journalist days before he committed suicide in February. Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian who is also Thompson's official biographer, writes that a Feb. 16 note may be Thompson's final written words. It reads: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun _ for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax _ This won't hurt." Hunter left the note for his wife, Anita. He shot himself four days later at his home in Aspen, Colo., after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement. Written in black marker, the note was titled, "Football Season Is Over." Brinkley writes in the magazine, on newsstands Friday, "February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high- water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time." Most of Thompson's early writings appeared in Rolling Stone. In pieces of great length, he often portrayed himself as a wildly intoxicated observer and participant. The writer's ashes were blown into the sky in Woody Creek, Colo., amid fireworks on Aug. 20. Bombs (sic) Bursting in Air: Hunter S. Thompson's farewell a great, sordid letdown By Michael Swindle The Village Voice 1974. Kandahar, Afghanistan. Spozmay Hotel. Habib, the proprietor, has brought a tray of assorted varieties of hashish and kief to mi hermano Alabama Billy Messerschidt's garden suite -- a first-floor one-room that opens onto a field of opium poppies in brilliant bloom. He is almost to the dregs of his morning pot of black tea, as he surveys his options and tells Habib he'll have a gram of black-slab Afghani, a vial of the local hash oil, and a chunk of that beautiful yellow kief that looks like bee pollen and is so much better for you. A pinch of this, a taste of that, a last dram of tea, and Billy is ready to step under the suspended steel water tank that Habib's man has somehow, magically, made hot with a wood fire, and pull the chain for the rapid and brief cascade that passes for a shower in those parts. Habib has a neon sign that flashes "Spozmay Hotel" in alternating colors. He is inordinately proud of this sign, and spends his evenings gazing admiringly at it for hours on end. "Green," says Habib, "red. Green. Red. Green. Red . . ."  August 20, 2005. Eight-something p.m. on a dark stretch of Colorado state highway 82 overlooking the late Hunter S. Thompson's Owl Farm. Soon will come the finale of the fiercely private public extravaganza that is the Godfather of Gonzo Journalism's "funeral." His ashes will be blasted from a custom-made "cannon," a 153-foot phallic structure in the form of the now legendary symbol of Gonzo Power: the shaft a lighted dagger blade fronting 11 explosive-and-HST-ashes-packed chrome cylinders, topped by a fiberglass clenched double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button that is allegedly "spinning." The "glans," if you will, is pulsing: "red. Purple. Green. Red. Purple. Green. Red . . ." This week of near-insane Hunterism here in Sow's Ear, Calorado, which began on Tuesday afternoon past, when HST's ashes, meticulously divided among 30 fireworks mortars -- 10 red in color, 10 white, 10 blue -- by the world-renowned Pennsylvania-based Zambelli family's Fireworks Internationale, arrived in an armored car, according to a spokesperson for Thompson's widow Anita, "for the safety of the community." Pardon the tangent, but I was disturbed by Aspen Daily News reporter Troy Hooper's serial use of the word "pulverized" in describing HST's remains. Try as I might, I cannot find it within myself to equate that particular word with someone who has been cremated. They didn't use a hammer, goddamit. It were FIRE! On another front on that Tuesday, HST's neighbor Jimmy Ibbotson, of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band fame and seemingly heir apparent for Hunter's sinecure as craziest motherfucker in Woody Creek, made the wire services when he opened fire with his shotgun on what he termed a "paparazzi," who wanted to park on his property. "I wasn't aiming at him," said Ibbotson, known to one and all in these parts as Ibby. "I just wanted to scare his ass." Ibby, his good-natured maniacal hectoring of those assembled at the Woody Creek Tavern notwithstanding, was involved in one of the few bright spots in a week not noted for same. On Friday afternoon, he commandeered a guitar and joined noted composer, musician, and Beat scenester David Amram -- on pocket flute and mini-tabla -- in an half-hour-long, improvisational jam of "Mr. Bojangles" that brought a surprising dignity to one of the sappiest tunes ever penned. Amram, a longtime pal of HST's and, in the spirit of full disclosure, a friend of mine whom I hadn't seen since 1972, was invited to come to "the event," and planned to perform a special arrangement of "My Old Kentucky Home," in homage to Hunter's birthplace. Having been tossed onto the slag heap known in this neck of the woods as "The Press," I was not able to actually hear his handiwork, but I know in my heart that when his rendition sailed into the crisp Front Range ether, grown men cried and women bared their breasts. Brothers and sisters, space limitations -- that, by the way, defy human comprehension -- prevent me from detailing for you the extent of the sordidness that went down over the past five days here in Sow's Ear, Calorado. The surprising thing about this is that Hunter's fans were not the source of the abovementioned. I take no joy in telling you that it was HST's folks who were emanating the creepiest vibes. I cannot say it any better than John Rothchild of Miami (Florida or Ohio, I do not know) did in his letter to the editor published in the Sunday, August 21, edition of the Aspen Daily News, so I give him the floor: "Editor: Just rode up Lenado, past Hunter launch site. Rent-a-cops everywhere, some peering into hills with binoculars -- looking for invaders? Twice, I got stopped on my bike and told, 'don't loiter, keep moving, don't take any pictures.' The guy who made his reputation opposing authority exits the planet completely surrounded by authority. Who'd have thunk it?" Which brings us back to a dark stretch of Calorado state highway 82, nearing 9 p.m. on a day after the full moon August 20, 2005, where I am standing with a couple of pals who, like me, way back when, could not stand the wait for the second installment of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in the Rolling Stone. News reports relayed to me from various friends seem to run in an identical Party Line that read like this AP item: "With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky amid fireworks late Saturday, as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of 'gonzo journalism.'" My wife read me this and I asked her, for reasons of my own, if they had capitalized the j in journalism. Her answer: "Neither the g nor the j." See what I mean? If you're saying "yes," yeah you're fuckin' right! If it's "no", well, think about it; it'll come to you. I hope. I'm sorry to be redundant, but I take no, that's NO, joy in giving you this news: Two weeks ago I was on the Alabama Gulf Coast with my 4-and 3-year-old grandsons, and I shot off $15 worth of Black Cat bottle rockets that was a better show. They say Johnny Depp, bless his heart, coughed up most of the reported $2.5 million "the event" cost. He got screwed. By my best calculations, I figure "they" spent $2.499 million on the booze for the party, and the Zambellis had to make do with the leftover. As I stood out there on 82 for an hour waiting for a finale that had already happened, I thought of two young guys I had met at the Woody Creek Tavern, who had driven from north Washington state for "the event": Chad, a toned athletic Park Service Ranger candidate, and his charmingly dissolute cousin Sean. Sean, on a dare, had eaten all the psychedelic mushrooms they had with them as Chad drove through Utah. "Except for digging a few cloud formations," Sean said, "all I did was sweat and worry about Mormons." The last time I saw him before zero hour, Sean was steady drinking rough alcohol and chasing it with reefer. And I couldn't help but believe that Sean and his kin were the ones putting the grin on Hunter's face. And I couldn't help but think that "the event" would have made him bull goose looney. To close on a personal note, Hunter: This is the shittiest place I have ever been in my miserable fucking life, and that includes the DMZ and Port-au-Prince in 1994. So long, pal. Stay on the Sunnyside.  Ashes-to-Fireworks Send-Off for an 'Outlaw' Writer By Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times August 22, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson indulged in numerous hallucinogenic fantasies over the years, but this weekend, one of them morphed into reality: his ashes were blasted into the sky over his farm here, carried by red, blue and silver fireworks in front of a 153-foot monument that Mr. Thompson, the writer and avatar of "gonzo" journalism, designed himself almost 30 years ago. Former Senator George McGovern, the protagonist of Mr. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," was among the 350 invitation-only guests who paid him tribute before liftoff. "I'm not quite sure where he's going," Mr. McGovern, 83, mused in his flat South Dakota prairie voice during two hours of alcohol-free tributes. "But I salute you and wish you a happy journey in that land of mystery." Mr. Thompson's family and friends - including Senator John Kerry, Lyle Lovett, Bill Murray, the musician David Amram, Ed Bradley and locals like Bob Braudis, the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo. - watched Saturday night as his ashes exploded with fireworks, lingered in great puffs of milky smoke, then vanished. "When the going gets weird," Mr. Thompson once wrote, "the weird turn pro." Thus, six months to the day after Mr. Thompson shot himself to death at age 67 at his home here, did his family and friends produce a highly professional show, staged and choreographed by Hollywood and underwritten by his friend the actor Johnny Depp for more than $2 million. "It's nice to be able to give a little something back," Mr. Depp, who played Mr. Thompson in the film version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," told the crowd as the ceremony began solemnly about 6:30 Saturday night. "Hunter, this is for you." What unfolded here in the Rockies just outside of Aspen was the complete canonization of Mr. Thompson. At the entry to what could only be called the set, his portrait was hung at the center of his personal literary solar system, surrounded by the planets of Samuel T. Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, whose early history was entwined with Mr. Thompson's emerging career, said that Mr. Thompson was "the DNA of Rolling Stone" and called him "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century." Douglas Brinkley, the historian and Mr. Thompson's literary executor, said that beyond Mr. Thompson's persona as an outlaw journalist, "Hunter wanted to be remembered as a writer." He called him "the Billy the Kid of American literature." Throughout the tributes, the monument, sheathed Christo-like in a silky red fabric, loomed in the gloaming, becoming ever more prominent as the natural light faded and spotlights illuminated it against a backdrop of darkening cliffs. The service was private and laced with what was called "Academy Award-level" security. Mr. Thompson's fans were kept at bay, as were most of the news media, and guests were barred from bringing cellphones, cameras and recording devices. Orange cones marking a tow-away zone extended for three miles beyond Mr. Thompson's home off a narrow strip of rural roadway. Black-clad security guards, aided by a dozen county sheriff's deputies, patrolled the 40-acre property, which Mr. Thompson bought in 1968 for $50,000 and is now worth millions. By nightfall, scores of fans had gathered at the nearby Woody Creek Tavern and outside the gate to the property. Sheriff's deputies said that "numerous people" tried to crash the scene but were escorted away. The pavilion for guests, constructed in the last several weeks, was a vast stage set under a glass ceiling. To set a somber tone, everything, including the bar, was initially draped in black velvet. After the service, the black was lifted to reveal couches and Thompson memorabilia like stuffed peacocks and a gong. Above the bar were chandeliers and swatches of red velvet, evoking a frontier bordello. His widow spoke first. "We've been through a lot together," Anita Thompson, 32, told the guests. She sobbed her way through Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which she said was Mr. Thompson's favorite poem. Earlier in the day, Mrs. Thompson took a brief ride, accompanied by a reporter, high over the property in a crane used to construct the monument. She had flown with his ashes the week before to Pennsylvania, where she delivered them to the Zambelli fireworks company. Technicians encased the remains with the fireworks in mortar shells, which were driven back to Colorado in an armored car. "Hunter just wants to come home," she said, gazing out on the sharp peaks surrounding the valley. At the ceremony, Mr. Bradley of the CBS program "60 Minutes" described first learning of Mr. Thompson through his writings in 1972 and thinking of him as an "off-the-wall madman"; eventually Mr. Thompson became one of his closest friends. Like others, he spoke of his grief at losing Mr. Thompson, saying he thought he had finished his crying until he started writing his tribute. Mr. Wenner recalled his drug-crazed exploits with Mr. Thompson but spoke of his feelings as well, saying at one point that he had been jealous of how close Mr. Depp had become to Mr. Thompson. "Now those days are gone," Mr. Wenner said. "Once I had Hunter all to myself, and now I don't have him at all. And none of us do." Mr. Thompson's son, Juan Thompson, 41, closed the tributes, a reminder that the ceremony was not only about a counterculture legend but also a father. He said he was not seeking "closure," dismissing that as "a Dr. Phil word." "I don't want closure; I want to remember him," he said. "Missing him is a way of loving him." As Champagne was served, Juan Thompson declared: "The king is dead. Long live the king." His father then appeared on screen from a 1978 BBC documentary, describing how he wanted his ashes dispersed. He drew up plans that looked remarkably like the steel monument a few hundred feet away. Norman Greenbaum's 1969 anthem "Spirit in the Sky" then rose from the sound system, with the lyrics: "When they lay me down to die/ Going on up to the spirit in the sky." The silky red dressing around the monument slowly unpeeled itself, revealing a rocket-like structure embedded with a dagger. It was crowned by Mr. Thompson's logo, a two-and-a-half-ton red fist with two thumbs and a psychedelic peyote button pulsating at its center, a Day-Glo sight visible for miles around. The final send-off began with Japanese ceremonial drummers and Buddhist readings in Tibetan. Then, with a bang that Matt Wood, a Zambelli fireworks designer and producer, described as just below the level of a sonic boom, 34 lines of fireworks streamed from the ground. The whole display lasted less than a minute, after which a recording of Bob Dylan wailed with "Mr. Tambourine Man" ("I'm ready for to fade/Into my own parade"). The partying then commenced, with jam sessions into the wee hours. The monument, taller than the Statue of Liberty, is temporary because it violates local ordinances. Mrs. Thompson said she hoped to keep it up for two weeks, then would build a pond nearby as a permanent sanctuary, with a government-issued tombstone. (Mr. Thompson was an Air Force veteran.) She plans to inscribe it with a Thompson saying: "It never got weird enough for me." Gonzo goes out with a bang The Associated Press (SydMo) August 21, 2005  "With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky from a 47-metre tower as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of 'gonzo journalism.' "As the ashes erupted from the tower's pinnacle, red, white, blue and green fireworks lit up the sky over Thompson's home today for nearly 10 minutes as the crowd cheered. The actual blasts with the ashes took about 30 seconds." Friends, Fans Gather for Gonzo Farewell By Robert Weller The Associated Press (WaPo) August 20, 2005 Iconoclastic journalist Hunter S. Thompson would have loved the 153-foot tower built to blast his ashes into the sky, said one of his many friends and admirers gathered for an unsolemn farewell. "It's a beautiful structure. Of course, he would not have been able to resist putting a few holes into it," said Michael Cleverly, referring to his former neighbor's love of shooting guns. "But it weighs several tons, so it could handle a few holes." The counterculture author killed himself six months ago at his home near Aspen. His ashes, intermingled with fireworks, were to be fired out of the tower Saturday evening in front of a star-studded crowd at his Owl Farm compound. "He loved explosions," his wife, Anita Thompson, explained during the planning of the fireworks sendoff.  The tower -- intentionally built just taller than the Statue of Liberty -- was erected in a field between Thompson's home and a tree-covered canyon wall. It was shrouded in tarpaulins for days, but his widow, Anita, said it was modeled after Thompson's Gonzo logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with two thumbs, rising from the hilt of a dagger.The memorial was expected to be a party, with plenty of alcohol, reminiscences, readings from Thompson's works and performances by both Lyle Lovett and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. About 250 people were invited, including Thompson's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman, and actors Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, close friends of the writer. Depp portrayed Thompson in the 1998 movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," perhaps the writer's most well-known work. Anita Thompson said Depp funded much of the celebration. "We had talked a couple of times about his last wishes to be shot out of a cannon of his own design," Depp told The Associated Press last month. "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out." Thompson was credited along with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism _ he dubbed his version "gonzo journalism" _ in which the writer was an essential component of the story. Thompson often portrayed himself as wildly intoxicated as he reported on figures such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. At the height of the Watergate era, he said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character." Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote an expose on the Hell's Angels and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," in which the central character was a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant. The Kentucky-born writer also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury." In this now-chic resort community, he proudly fired his guns whenever he wanted, let peacocks have the run of the land and ran for sheriff in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner. Thompson shot himself in his kitchen Feb. 20, apparently unable to handle his declining health. One close acquaintance suggested Thompson did not want old age to dictate the circumstances of his death. Anita Thompson said no suicide note was left. Final send-off in Colo. today for king of gonzo journalism By Dan Elliott The Associated Press (BoGlo) August 20, 2005 A hand-scrawled note on the refrigerator in Hunter S. Thompson's kitchen says: "Never call 911/ Never/This means you/HST." Over the sink, a snapshot shows the famously reckless father of "gonzo journalism" nuzzling a tiny kitten. This room -- jammed with cooking utensils, writing mementos, and a huge television -- is where Thompson wrote some of the acerbic books and articles that made him an American treasure in the late 1960s and early '70s. It is also where he fatally shot himself six months ago at age 67. The kitchen remains a center of Thompson's still-swirling universe as family and friends wrap up plans to blast his ashes out of a 150-foot-tall monument behind the house at Owl Farm today. It's what Thompson wanted. "No crying, no tears, only celebration," Thompson's widow, Anita, said during a 2 1/2-hour interview at the home and her makeshift office, providing a rare glimpse into the writer's world. "He wanted people to celebrate," she said. "He envisioned it to be a beautiful party. The most amazing people would be there. His friends would celebrate his life. And he was even specific that there would be clinking of ice and whiskey." The monument towers over a field between the home and a tree-covered red rock canyon wall. It is shrouded in gray and blue tarpaulins that ripple in the wind, and it will not be unveiled until today. It is modeled after Thompson's gonzo logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with the addition of a second thumb, perched atop a dagger. Anita Thompson said the event will include some reminiscence, readings from Thompson's work, and performances by Lyle Lovett as well as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. About 250 people were invited, including the author's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman, and actors Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, close friends of the writer. Depp, who portrayed the writer in the 1998 movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," is financing much of the send-off, Thompson said. She said that she doesn't know the total cost, and that others have offered to chip in. The event is private, and security will be tight. David Meeker of Specialized Protective Services in Aspen would say only that the precautions will be more elaborate than for any similar-sized event he has ever protected. The narrow roads that thread the canyon will remain open, but Pitkin County deputies will bar anyone from stopping to watch from outside the property, Thompson said. Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Thompson's, did not return a call. After today, the monument will be taken down. Thompson, 32, who married the writer in April 2003, said she plans to protect and promote her husband's legacy. "I'll be working for Hunter the rest of my life. I know that. I made that commitment, and I'm honored that I can," she said. Gonzo in Space: Hunter Thompson Gets Wish, Ashes to be Fired Out Of Cannon in August Editor & Publisher July 11, 2005 The long-awaited firing of gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson's ashes into space from a cannon will take place August 20 from behind his home in Woody Creek, Colo., near Aspen. Actor Johnny Depp has arranged the event through a Beverly Hills, Ca. "event planner," reports the Denver Post. The remains of the late writer will be blasted from the top of a 150-foot temporary tower exactly six months after his suicide by gunshot. Neighbors and family members have reportedly gone along with the idea, and the required official okays have been secured. Depp has promised to make sure private security keeps the public out [which is a sharp left turn away from the public ceremony mentioned a few months ago, ne? Methinks this link sums it up well.] Hunter Thompson’s family seeks permanent home for his archives By Jeff Kass Scripps Howard News Service May 30, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson’s son bounds into the room on a recent Saturday morning wearing a pinkish, plastic visor, circa 1971, that reads “Las Vegas” alongside a picture of two dice. This decades-old knickknack is among the multitude of items set to become part of the writer’s archives, which Thompson’s family and estate executors expect will elevate his literary standing. “It will be a good way to help him to continue to be taken seriously,” said Juan Thompson. “Most people don’t (take him seriously). He’s that wild man who did a lot of drugs and did a lot of crazy stuff.” Thompson’s personal and professional life - which he generally melded together - was, in fact, split between drugs and swashbuckling cultural criticism. The author of such iconic books as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas killed himself with a handgun in the kitchen of his Woody Creek home Feb. 20. The Associated Press recently was given a glimpse of some items in the archives. They include manuscripts, as well as the visor, cocktail napkins and rental car receipts from Las Vegas. There are photos of the author with the Hell’s Angels and examples of his “shotgun art.” Thompson’s family and executors hope to place the archives, now in temporary storage at a secret site in Aspen, with a university in a city or state with some connection to the author. Obvious candidates include Kentucky, Thompson’s birthplace; Colorado, where he lived for nearly 40 years; and literary-rich New York, where he once worked. “Something that would feel right for Hunter,” added presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who also is Thompson’s official biographer. “He’s somebody who didn’t like Phoenix.” For now, the archives are a hodgepodge of file cabinets, storage tubes, miscellaneous stacks and hundreds of cardboard boxes. One is labeled “Mags and Newspapers 1967-1980.” A box that reads “Steadman, R.,” surely refers to Ralph Steadman, who illustrated many of Thompson’s works. And visible in the stacks is a large, multicolored Steadman drawing of the “lizard lounge” scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book’s original manuscript also resides in the archives, said the late author’s wife, Anita Thompson. Juan Thompson says his father’s presence remains strongest at his residence, nicknamed Owl Farm. But meandering through the archives gives Juan a sense of finality surrounding his father’s death. “When he (my father) was alive, he would never, ever, ever have allowed this to leave the house,” he says, wearing his father’s Aztec medallion necklace, which will not go into the archives. Other items include a swath of padded manila paper that references Thompson’s novel and reads: “Rum Diary Bound Galleys.” Another box is for Thompson’s unfinished book, “Polo is My Life.” Inside that box are manuscripts, notes and outlines. Anita Thompson cannot immediately locate them, but says polo mallets are somewhere in the room. Juan Thompson recalls hotel bills from 20 years past, and 1,000 small, hotel-sized bars of Neutrogena soap Thompson probably purchased when he first discovered the brand. Anita Thompson said her husband learned his archival ways from his mother, a librarian. Brinkley said Thompson’s letters to his mom when he was jailed at 17 are among the items that have not yet been made public. Thompson was an avid reader, and books lying about include the 1950 novel “Joy Street” by Frances Parkinson Keyes and “Alice in Wonderland.” Thompson’s reporter notebooks chronicle him discussing the Black Panthers while at the Louisville, Ky., airport — a scene recounted in his story, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” “He was a chronicler of himself,” Brinkley said, and added, “It’s a unique view of modern America.” "Gonzo" send-off taking shape Friends, family of Hunter Thompson organizing cannon ceremony By Troy Hooper The Denver Post April 6, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon sculpted into a 53- foot-high fist in a public ceremony in August, his widow said Tuesday. Anita Thompson said Bob Dylan may be invited to perform "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the send-off ceremony being organized by friends and family, including actor Johnny Depp. Hunter S. Thompson, the noted "gonzo" journalist, shot and killed himself in the kitchen of his home near here on Feb. 20. "Hunter came into a lot of people's lives, and he's left a lot of people feeling alone," Anita Thompson said. "They'll always have Hunter's books to read, but it will be nice to get together at least once to share the Hunter Thompson experience." As far back as the 1970s, and leading up to his final days, the writer envisioned having his remains scattered across his rural Woody Creek estate in a thunderous explosion to symbolize how he lived: wild and furiously. Family and friends have been referring to a 1978 British Broadcasting Corp. documentary titled "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood" to garner details of the late writer's wishes. In the film, Thompson discussed his vision during a visit to a mortuary. The exact date of the August ceremony and official approvals from Pitkin County are still pending, but Anita Thompson said her late husband's friends are already beginning to construct the giant monument. Depp, who played Thompson in 1998's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas," has been a driving force behind the project and has been showing friends conceptions of the sculpture that he is carrying on his laptop. "Johnny Depp has been very generous in funding the project so far," said Anita Thompson, noting she was not sure how much the last blast will cost, but that it would be "worth every penny." The gonzo fist - a symbol that appears on many Thompson works - would be 53 feet high and mounted on a 100-foot pillar. Thompson's ashes would explode out of a peyote button clenched by the fist. At least one Thompson neighbor and friend is offering to donate some of his acreage to accommodate camping for visitors. During a break at a Pitkin County commissioners' meeting Tuesday, officials said the ceremony could require a permit. Commissioner Michael Owsley is supportive of the plan. "I think people should think of ways to remember Hunter. His death was a terrible loss to Woody Creek," said Owsley, who lives down the road from Thompson's compound. "It's just awful out there now. It's so lonely." Hunter Thompson's ashes to be shot from cannon [in August] The Associated Press Apr. 5, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high sculpture of the journalist's "gonzo fist" emblem, his wife said Tuesday. The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer's long-cherished wish. "It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions." Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on Feb. 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil. The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson's life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, Anita Thompson said. She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 100-foot pillar, making the monument 153 feet high. It will resemble Thompson's personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with "Gonzo" emblazoned across it. Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer's 100-acre property. She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme. Meanwhile, Playboy magazine this week is publishing an interview with Thompson based on a series of conversations he had with magazine staffer Tim Mohr in December. In the interview, Thompson discusses a range of topics from political freedom to the best kind of snow tires to buy but offers no obvious hints of his impending suicide. "He was really enthusiastic and full of energy," Mohr told The Associated Press on Monday. Thompson even talked about embarking on a long-term project to expand the Playboy piece into a book, "a guide to life, sort of a handbook," Mohr said. The interview appears in the magazine's May issue, which hits newsstands Friday.  Rolling Stone catalogs memories of late Hunter S. Thompson 33 pages dedicated to Woody Creek author By Chad Abraham The Aspen Times March 11, 2005 Rolling Stone magazine's expansive effort to detail the "life force" that was Hunter S. Thompson hits newsstands today. The magazine, which published his seminal "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in two parts in consecutive issues in 1971 and kept him on the masthead for nearly four decades, devotes 33 pages to the legendary Woody Creek author. Founder and Editor in Chief Jann Wenner writes about the first time he met Thompson: "He was thirty-three, stood six-three, shaved bald, dark glasses, smoking, carrying two six-packs of beer; he sat down, slowly unpacked a leather satchel full of 'travel necessities' onto my desk - mainly hardware, like flashlights, a siren, knives, boxes of cigarettes and filters, whiskey, corkscrews, flares - and didn't leave for three hours." Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Thompson's books of letters, writes a mesmerizing article titled "The Final Days at Owl Farm." There are also plenty of photos and a touching, melancholic farewell painting from longtime friend and collaborator Ralph Steadman. Perhaps most entertaining are the snippets of remembrances that Rolling Stone procured from those who were actually close to him. These are not people who say, in the words of Deputy Managing Editor Will Dana, " 'I snorted cocaine once with Hunter in 1978 and, boy, it changed my life.' We got about 40 of those unsolicited three or four days after he died," he said yesterday. Instead, the tributes are from people such as Dr. Robert Geiger, who sheltered Thompson, his first wife, Sandy, and son Juan when they were evicted in 1965 in Sonoma, Calif. Nixon aide Pat Buchanan writes of vicious, Wild Turkey-laden arguments over communism lasting until dawn. Steadman gives a truly hilarious account of Thompson helping the artist overcome seasickness. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, possibly the author's closest friend, writes that "Hunter was always a very important member of my family here." The issue, which kept getting "bigger and bigger," Dana said, also has a United States president recalling how Hunter threatened his press secretary. In Jimmy Carter's short piece, he says some of the subjects Thompson brought up were "discomforting." Longtime Aspenite Jack Nicholson uses a bit of his space to plug a potential fund-raiser involving Thompson, himself and the Aspen Music Festival and School. Finally, there are the memories from a son and a wife. Juan Thompson's essay is a tearful, brief exploration on a complex relationship, as is Anita Thompson's farewell letter. And the same could be said of the Rolling Stone issue itself. "I thought it came out pretty great," Dana said. "It just was obvious that we had to do something big." Hunter S. Thompson and Mental Health By George Thomas Clark ChronWatch Since Hunter Thompson put a gun in his mouth and shot himself last week, I’ve been digging deep into the Internet and reading lots of articles about him. The first wave of stories commended his hard-punching, eye-gouging, “gonzo” style of insightful political writing in such books as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Kingdom of Fear,” and recalled with wonderment and affection his manic consumption of alcohol, LSD, cocaine, and enough other intoxicants to fill the Physician’s Desk Reference. A couple of days after the coroner came, many who’d known the man, or witnessed one or more of his countless binges, began to somberly note that he really had drunk, snorted, and dropped too many unforgiving things and such behavior wasn’t so amusing and admirable after all. But in none of the articles I’ve found has anyone said, “Hey, Hunter should have gotten help.”  That is amazing, and appallingly typical. If a guy gets a toothache he’ll dash to the dentist. A fever sends him scampering to the doctor. A rash drives him scratching to the dermatologist. Heart, liver, kidney, and stomach problems are also widely understood to require medical attention. But what about the human brain? It is easily the most astonishing organ in this solar system, yet it’s usually considered a body part unworthy of professional treatment. The essential problem is ignorance; most people still view the brain as a primarily psychic phenomenon and assume that common (even rampant) ailments like depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and excessive anger should either be ignored or treated with more alcohol or cigarettes or, most admirably, by gnawing on the stick of righteous stoicism. None of those will work. People whose brains have sentenced them to unrelenting depressive pain, generally because of an intrinsic chemical imbalance, must be treated medically. A guy like Thompson, who drunkenly barrels into public events, snorts coke in a thousand bathrooms, stands barefoot in the snow shooting guns in the middle of the night, hordes explosives, and repeatedly tells his wife that he’s considering suicide, is a guy who needs help. Perhaps his wife did suggest he see a psychiatrist. She should have insisted. Instead, the Associated Press quotes her as having threatened to leave him. His final act certainly wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have saved him. Only Thompson had a chance to do that. When Thompson broke his leg in Hawaii last year, Sean Penn immediately spent twenty-seven grand to fly him back to the writer’s “fortified compound” – the focal point of his isolation and paranoia – in Colorado. That was a compassionate gesture by Penn but would have been far more helpful had the jet been pointed toward a mental health facility. Thompson would have bellowed upon arriving. He probably would have refused treatment, claiming he didn’t need it but the rest of the world did. He was, however, decidedly capable of admitting some kinds of pain. He acknowledged his hip hurt bad enough to be replaced, and underwent the operation. So Hunter S. Thompson, a very tough guy, or at least a tough talker, was willing to get the best treatment for his leg and his hip. But like too many others in mental distress, he didn’t understand his brain also deserved the finest medical attention. Hunter Thompson suicide a selfish act By Bill Wineke Wisconsin State Journal I really wonder if we aren't going too far in romanticizing the life and suicide of Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson, the famed "gonzo" author of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," took his life last Sunday. He sat at the [counter] of his home near Aspen, Colo., took a sip of Chivas Regal, put a 45-caliber handgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. Thompson was 67, had spent a good part of his life high on drugs and on whiskey, and didn't really often write as well as he had when he was younger. His suicide has become the stuff of legend, as has his colorful lifestyle. His supporters, including his own family, boast that he "went out at the top," that not for him was an old-age filled with doctors and medical tubes. What isn't said is that there is something -- to my mind, at least -- selfish and brutal about killing oneself while one's son and grandson are playing a game in the next room. Thompson was a genius writer, but he was also a pathetic individual. If you take him at his word -- and I do -- he couldn't be creative without the assistance of vast amounts of whiskey and substantial amounts of drugs. I doubt very much that it was true; I don't doubt for a minute that he believed it to be true. He was a great writer. He was also a drunk. One thing that is true of drunks, genius or not, is that, as they age, they become more and more focused on themselves. Continued alcohol and drug abuse is a slow form of suicide in itself, and it isn't in the least bit unusual for it to end in a formal suicide. If a grandson happens to be in the next room, oh, well. Most of us who drink too much or who are addicted to drugs at least have the advantage of people around us who want us to change. They might plead with us. They might leave us or fire us or just try to stay away from us. We might lose our jobs or our homes or our families. Some of us end up on the streets. The world sends us messages that we should clean up our acts. That's not so if we are really talented or if we are really rich. Then, it seems, the world has a vested interest in keeping us addicted. The world didn't stand in judgment of Hunter Thompson, the world egged him on. We loved his outrageous behavior. We chuckled when he was characterized in cartoons. Some of us made pilgrimages to Owl Farm, hoping to share a Wild Turkey with the great one. So, too, did we glory in his suicide. His family said he was a "warrior." Various admirers [have] volunteered to help carry out one of his funeral wishes -- that his ashes be shot from a cannon. It [is] all so romantic. Even if Hunter Thompson had wanted to give up drugs and alcohol, we would have done our best to convince him otherwise. We didn't really notice that it has been quite a while since Thompson produced an original book. Nor did we care that his writing often became a parody of his earlier work. In fact, we liked it that way. There's one haunting question about Hunter Thompson, the answer to which we will never know: Just what might he have written had he given himself an opportunity to mature as a writer?  Thompson had end all planned, wife says By Troy Hooper The Denver Post ASPEN - Hunter S. Thompson not only planned his suicide, but he also provided instructions on how he wanted his legacy preserved, his wife, Anita, said Thursday in her first public interview since his death. "At first I was very angry; he was my best friend, my lover, my partner and my teacher," Anita Thompson said. "But I know he is much more powerful and alive now than ever before. He is in all of our hearts. His death was a triumph of his own human spirit because this is what he wanted. He lived and died like a champion." In recent months, he had repeatedly talked of killing himself, she said, and had been issuing directives, orally and in writing, on what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished work and his assets. Speaking Thursday from their Woody Creek compound known as Owl Farm, Anita Thompson, 32, said that her 67-year-old husband's suicidal designs put an intense strain on their relationship but that his motives were not rooted in desperation or fear; he simply felt his time had come. "I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision. It was a problem for us," said Thompson, who retreated to her parents' house in Fort Collins when the two quarreled. There, she said, he would fax her love letters. The couple, who married in April 2003, had a profound affection for each other, and though they occasionally feuded over the author's death wish, friends say they always reconciled. "Hunter loved Anita so much. They were a shining example of two people who couldn't keep their hands off of each other," said family friend Tim Mooney, a former manager for musician Jimmy Buffett who first met Hunter Thompson while working behind the bar at the Hotel Jerome in the 1970s. On Sunday, Anita Thompson called her husband from the Aspen Club & Spa, and he told her: "Come home so I can work on my column," she said. Then, she said, he set the receiver down, and she heard a clicking noise that she thought might be computer keystrokes but now believes was the sound of a gun. The father of "gonzo" journalism put a .45-caliber gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. "I'm going to miss him horribly. You can't even imagine," Anita Thompson said. Juan Thompson, a Denver resident and the author's 40-year- old son; his wife, Jennifer Winkel Thompson; and their 6-year-old son, Will, were the only ones in the house when the shooting happened about 5:30 p.m. They told investigators the shot sounded like a book crashing to the floor. Juan Thompson found his father slumped in the chair in which he sat to write many of his classic works. Anita Thompson said she took a van from the club back to their home northeast of Aspen, where she was met by sheriff's deputies and tragedy. Inside, the phone receiver was resting on the kitchen counter next to the typewriter and a glass of the author's favorite whiskey, Chivas Regal, she said. Thompson married twice -- first to Sandra Dawn Thompson Tarlo, who is Juan Thompson's mother, and then to Anita. The night before he killed himself, Thompson gave his son a medallion he once received from Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Chicano lawyer, writer and speaker fictionalized in the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," as well as an emerald pendant Thompson had worn since 1976. Anita Thompson said her husband told Juan to give the pendant to her after he died. She said that none of Thompson's family members knew when he planned on turning a gun on himself -- a la his idol, Ernest Hemingway -- and that she would have intervened and "called in a SWAT team" if she had known the end was so near. In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Juan Thompson said the only thing that surprised him about his father's death was the timing. "One thing he said many times was that 'I'm a road man for the lords of karma.' It's cryptic, but there's an implication there that he may have decided that his work was done and that he didn't want to overstay his welcome; it was time to go," he said. Juan Thompson said his father had been in pain from a hip replacement, a broken leg and back surgery, but "I really don't believe it was motivated by pain." Anita Thompson said she plans to carry on her husband's legacy as he instructed. "I have a lot of work to do, even more than before," she said, declining to reveal specifics of Thompson's final requests. But she did confirm the family plans to blast her husband's ashes out of a cannon on Owl Farm in spectacular fashion, as he had wished. "I think we should," she said. "The more explosions, the better." Blast into sky could be Thompson's last hurrah By Nancy Lofholm The Denver Post ASPEN, Colo. -- In what could pass for an outlandish scene from the pages of one of Hunter Thompson's books, actor Johnny Depp and others who were close to the Gonzo journalist are searching for a cannon to grant the author's wish that his remains be blasted into the sky. "If it can be done, we will do it," said Boston entertainment attorney George Tobia Jr., who represented Thompson for about 15 years. "Maybe it will be part of a public thing, or maybe one night a shot will ring out and people will know. ... " Thompson's unusual send-off is not the only posthumous bang that can be expected from a prolific writer who turned journalism on its head with his incisive and manic observations of everything from the Hell's Angels to hoops games. Tobia said many unpublished works are forthcoming. When Thompson committed suicide Sunday night at his home here, he left behind numerous collections of unpublished writings, including a novel called "Prince Jelly Fish," reams of essays and scads of letters. Some of the writings are in manuscript form. Some are included in Thompson's detailed files of everything he ever wrote going back half a century. Many are in faxes. President Bush's re-election was a frequent topic. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction merited at least one essay. "He has a voluminous legacy of work," said Tobia, who has also represented the interests of famous beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. "There was hardly a day that went by when Hunter didn't send out a fax. And it wouldn't be a two-line fax. It was always a screed. They were so well-written." Tobia and other representatives of Thompson's estate will be sifting through the unpublished writings to decide when and in what form they will be published. But first, they have to take care of the matter of the cannon. Thompson liked to joke that he was cannon fodder, which led to his oft-expressed wish for one final blast. It's a wish that legally could fly. "I think if someone wanted to fire a cannon on their own property, I think they could do that," said Pitkin County sheriff's investigator Joe Disalvo. "I think by statute it would be OK." Thompson was cremated in Glenwood Springs, Colo., yesterday. Depp became part of the cannon search because he and Thompson have been close friends since working together on the 1998 movie version of Thompson's seminal political tome, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Depp played Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke. Thompson fans may be able to witness that unusual send-off, but they will have to wait. Thompson's close friends and family will have a private gathering March 5. A public ceremony is planned to take place in the spring or early summer.  Hunter's Kitchen By Troy Hooper Aspen Daily News Hunter Stockton Thompson lived and died in the kitchen. The hard-living, self-destructive gonzo journalist's story instantaneously richocheted around the world Sunday evening after he blew a .45-caliber bullet through his head and completed the final chapter of his storied life. The 67-year-old writer's 40-year-old son, Juan, told investigators he found his father lying in the kitchen of the fortified compound known as Owl Farm after hearing what sounded like a book crashing to the floor. The time of death was approximately 5:42 p.m. Anita, the author's wife of almost two years, was not home at the time. Thompson's 6-year-old grandson, William, was the only other person in the house. "I can't believe it. It just doesn't make sense that Hunter would do this. But we all know there were a lot of times Hunter didn't seem to make sense," said Gaylord Guenin, a Woody Creek Tavern chieftain and neighbor of Thompson who knew him for 36 years. "He was an intricate part of the valley. It takes something like this to make you sit back and really appreciate it." Ever since moving to the rural, funky neighborhood of Woody Creek in 1967, Thompson's kitchen at Owl Farm served as his office, his gambling parlor, his political war room, his rehabilitation clinic and, simply, a place to hang out. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a regular betting partner and close friend of Thompson's, described the kitchen as "a salon reminiscent of Paris in the 1920s. It was full of artists, politicians, winners, losers -- and Hunter made the house rules, especially when it came to wagering." Whatever the situation, the counterculture author known best for the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" spent much of his time perched on a stool behind the kitchen counter that supported the typewriter he used to create some of his best work. In recent years, Thompson began to spend more and more time there. He suffered a broken left leg in December 2003 at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hawai'i after he "executed a sharp turn at the mini-bar" and fell on the polished floor of his ninth-floor suite. Actor Sean Penn chartered a private jet costing more than $30,000 to fly him back to Colorado. Up until his last days, Thompson's leg continued to plague him with pain. He also had an artificial hip, and he recently had back surgery. A simple journey to the bathroom forced the cult writer to hold onto his loved ones for support, as he limped across the room. "I knew he was dying from a distance. It hurt him being in so much pain," said Jimmy Ibbotson, a longtime neighbor and former singer-guitarist of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band who, like others before him, had been 86'd from Thompson's kitchen for poor behavior. Ibbotson isn't the only one to feel Thompson's wrath. The musician's 14-year-old dog, known affectionately as Noble Columbo Scarface Sire of Woody Creek, found itself on the wrong end of Thompson's gun. "We call him Scarface because Hunter shot him years ago," said Ibbotson, pointing to a long scar across Columbo's forehead. "Hunter told me he'd shoot my dog if he kept messing with his peacocks — and he did." Behind "Keep Out" signs and the security personnel who stood guard at Owl Farm's front gate, Thompson's family and close friends comforted one another the day following his death. "The family is hugging, huddling and supporting each other through a difficult time. There has been literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, admirers and people all over the world," the sheriff said. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who has been in the midst of archiving Thompson's material for Tulane University, was en route to Aspen on Monday night to set up a media command post for the Thompson family. Over at the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson's favorite haunts, a grubby mix of ex-cons, alcoholics and drug addicts exchanged shots of Chivas Regal and wild stories about their famous neighbor who lived up the road. "I haven't ruled out that this is all part of an elaborate hoax," said Ibbotson, half-jokingly. "There are times when you've had enough of fame." Talk also turned to Thompson's fascination with firearms. He kept an arsenal of weapons in the house and enjoyed experimenting with explosives. On Super Bowl Sunday, a bomb technician from the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office had to be deployed to his home to remove an old, potentially explosive keg of gunpowder. But at the end of the day, all stories led back to Thompson's kitchen. "Dr. Thompson indelibly transformed journalism with his gonzo flair, but we should remember that his best stuff was rooted in reporting and sharp-eyed observation," Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, former managing editor of Time magazine and one-time chairman of CNN, wrote in an e-mail. Like many in the mainstream media, Isaacson had spent time in Thompson's kitchen, where groundbreaking prose flowed as freely as the whiskey and wine. "He sure stomped the earth, but he also knew how to write sentences that, because of their deft embedded clauses and personal riffs, and the way they were juxtaposed with short declarative eruptions, had a syncopated rhythm that delighted the ear," Isaacson wrote. "He was a wonderful talent. The whole gonzo journalism thing and the idea of inserting himself into the story was something he legitimized," agreed Larry Kramer, former Chairman and CEO of MarketWatch, now an executive for Dow Jones. Kramer was executive editor at the San Francisco Examiner during the 1980s when Thompson was a weekly columnist for the paper. "He made the stories more real. He was a larger-than-life character, but it really was him. ... By making it so entertaining, and by making it so outrageous, he captured a very broad constituency. He did it at a time when there was a lot of social activism and he would call a spade a spade -- and go further. He'd say things a lot of people thought, but would never say." Aspen resident Tim Mooney, a former manager for musicians Jimmy Buffet and John Denver, reminisced about his times in the kitchen with The Good Doctor. "The kitchen was the center of the family business. The nourishment was intellectual ideas: sports, gaming, current events, politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll. The family business ran 24 hours a day, eight days a week, and it was as relevant to be as close to the refrigerator and the ice machine and the toaster oven as it was to be next to the phone, next to the typewriter, next to the drawers full of the tools of the lifestyle that were catalogued with the Dewey Thompson Decimal System," said Mooney. "Hunter could watch the front door and the back door at the same time. Nobody could sneak up on him. He could perch himself eye-level with a constant revolving bulletin board full of information. He was constantly re-layering his thoughts and his writing on this bulletin board the size of his piano. ... Hunter had a decorum of politeness that he learned as a Louisville Southern Gentleman. If you talked out of turn, or out of your ass, you would be put in your place. It wasn't because you didn't deserve some slack; it was because it was impolite. The scene was totally controlled by Hunter because he was the one who had the deadline," Mooney said. "Everybody else was there for amusement, either Hunter's or their own."  Hunter, what were you thinking? By Mark Shaw Aspen Daily News Through the years, there was always Hunter Thompson to save the day. When everyone else was parading about life with no sense of what the hell was occurring, you were there to remind us that we needed to question everyone and everything that was happening. Your words shook people up, made them stop and think, wonder, ask questions, ask again, never take no for the answer. You were not afraid to speak your mind, to probe, to investigate and to write with a wonderful gift of words provided to you by God almighty. In the 1970s, I can easily recall you sitting at the Jerome Bar, cigarette holder in hand, debating the important issues of the day. Whether you were stone-cold sober (not a recurring event), drunk out of your mind, or stoned to the gills, people listened to you because they knew you weren't bullshitting them. If you ask Dr. Hunter Thompson a question, you got a straight answer - no fluff, no feel-good. When you ran for sheriff, I voted for you because you were a principled man, one that believed that we had too many rules, too many barriers to human development. "Just let people take care of themselves," was your credo, a strong message to those that wanted to decide for the populous what was right and what was wrong. This was an individual decision, you preached; just leave people alone and they will make the right choices. Were you a pompous ass, unreliable, crude, unreasonable, stubborn, unruly, and a bastard in every sense of the word? Absolutely, but you were also creative, loveable, caring, distinguished, a genius of sorts and a warrior for the downtrodden that never backed down even though criticism came your way from every direction. You just said, "Fuck you," and moved on, certain that you were the one person who could make a difference and you were. When I set up an interview with ABC's Good Morning America as their correspondent in the late 1970s, you agreed to participate and to be at the Jerome at 8 o'clock. That time quickly came and went, and you called at 10 a.m. and said you were on your way. Three hours later, you called and said that you were in your car on Highway 82 headed for Aspen. At 3 a.m., we finally gave up when I turned to a sleepy cameraman and said, "Yeah, that's Hunter; that's just the way he is." When I saw you the next day, it was like the interview mess never occurred. I never said a word about it, and neither did you and our friendship didn't blink. We had a drink and got stoned and started talking about the sorry state of the world, both of us of the opinion that you should run for president and show the big-time politicians what the country really needed. Through the years, your books amazed me. They were written in such a distinctive voice, a rabble-rouser, someone screaming for change and for people to wake up. As an aspiring writer, I read and read and read some more to gain an understanding of that magical talent you had for storytelling. Who knows what was fact or fiction, but it didn't matter. The words jumped off the page like a Bob Dylan song. You made me mad, you entertained me, you shouted at me, you made me stop and think. And you made me a better writer by having had the privilege of reading your fascinating prose. So, why Hunter have you disappointed me, and perhaps millions of others, who always believed that you would be writing and scolding those in power with your dying breath? I have no idea what demons may have infested your brain and soul, or if you were sick with some debilitating disease, but the Hunter Thompson I respected would have fought and fought some more and never have let down his family, his friends, and those who admired him by simply shooting himself in the head. Now, your life and career will be tarnished, at least in one man's mind, by the fact that you decided Hunter was more important than the world that needed you. What a shame.  Hunter S. Thompson: Death of an American Original Muckraker, and a writer for readers; Rolling Stone journalist could live a good story By David Weir The San Francisco Chronicle One afternoon in the late '70s, two of Rolling Stone's star writers, Hunter Thompson and Howard Kohn, met up in downtown Washington, ostensibly to discuss a joint speaking engagement scheduled for later that evening at the University of Maryland. As was typical on these occasions, alcohol was procured and drinking was done, especially by Dr. Thompson. As the afternoon turned to dusk, Kohn, by a considerable margin the more sober of the two, started to express concern as to whether they were going make it to their speaking venue on time. Thompson indicated that he was too busy drinking to worry about time and that Kohn should just go on ahead without him. So Kohn dutifully drove the 15 congested miles out past the Beltway to College Park, Md. As he was walking up to the hall where they were to speak, he worried how he could ever even hope to cover for the infinitely more colorful, entertaining (and famous) Dr. T. Suddenly, out of the sky, a helicopter appeared, setting down noisily on the campus green to discharge a cheerful, if tipsy, Thompson, balancing his latest drink, ready to roll. "How's it goin', Howard?" he called out to Kohn, standing agape amidst a growing crowd of adoring students. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson always knew how to make a grand entrance. He knew how to write a good lead, too. In fact, perhaps the main thing worth remembering about Thompson is what a talented writer he was, and how much care he took in the telling of his stories. Thompson knew about leads, and lively sentences, how to set up his characters, plus a thing or two about plot and action and pacing and drama. He knew how to get up close on the central mystery in his story, whether it was what makes a Hells Angel rev or a senator lie. He covered presidential politics better than anyone else of his day. He had what editors and writing teachers call "voice." In fact, his voice came through so loud and clear that his critics thought it pretty much overwhelmed whatever facts he might have been intending to convey. Maybe that's why in their remembrances this past week so much of the mainstream press has more or less politely dismissed Thompson as the father of the '60's style "new journalism." While true, that doesn't begin to tell his story or describe his place in history. Rather, it seems more accurate to see him as part of a much older strain of reporting, the one Teddy Roosevelt in a famously frustrated moment spat out as "muckraking." The kinds of stories Thompson did were much like those of the early 20th century writers Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens or Ida Tarbell (or even further back -- Mark Twain). Those writers, too, spoke in a fearless, passionate voice, occasionally blended fact with fiction and, like Thompson, refused to bow before the God of objectivity that seems to act as a constraint on so many young journalists today. The muckrakers saw through society's hypocritical veneer and wasted no time sharing their view with us. Far from being "objective," they breathed outrage. At their best, the muckrakers were fair, but they took no prisoners along the way. They never apologized for telling it as they saw it -- which was, in retrospect, proved to be pretty much the way it was. I always liked what the Bay Area's own Jessica Mitford, the "Queen of the Muckrakers," had to say much later in the 20th century. "Objectivity?" she quipped. "Sure, I believe in objectivity. I've always got an objective!" Which describes Hunter Thompson and his story-telling style quite nicely. This grand tradition lives on rather modestly today, more prevalent among bloggers than in the mainstream press. But, as history shows, these things tend to go in cycles, and it would be unwise to consign muckrakers to the margins -- or the past -- of American culture. They may well re-appear again, perhaps some day quite soon in a news outlet near you, as social conditions evolve and new opportunities emerge. Last Sunday evening, when he went into his kitchen, placed his gun to his head and blew out his brains, Hunter Thompson wrote the end to his own story. It was said he asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon. Just as with his leads, this was a man who knew how to write a pretty good kicker.  As his creative collaborator and friend, Ralph Steadman remembers Hunter S Thompson, who has shot himself at the age of 67 The UK Independent Hunter said these words to me many years ago: "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time." I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if, but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30 anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There was no first, second, third and top gear in the car - just overdrive. He was in a hurry. "Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes-Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage breast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway." So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas, he wrote the chorus. "Don't write, Ralph," he said, "you'll bring shame on your family." "Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song. On Sunday morning, I had just finished signing the 1,200 title pages for a limited-edition Taschen version of The Curse of LONO, which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically - obedient and mechanical - over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two Os of LONO, put the cigarette holder with long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with an extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task. Then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected to build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a 100ft-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. "Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!!" It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were fucking with his beloved Constitution and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologising himself at the same time. He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing; verbatim excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy he was hired by the milkman to collect bills outstanding from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and especially the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle. I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's Magazine in New York. He said: "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head, and cover the race? His name is Hunter S Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work." The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times' foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work - so I went. Finding Hunter - or indeed anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist - was no easy matter, and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine. I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred karate chop and gritty molasses. "Um-er, you-er wouldn't be from England, er, would you-er? An artist maybe-er -what the ...!" I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him." We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said only once, in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in the 1953 Grand National. And it did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said. "I thought you had been picked up," he replied. "Picked up?" I didn't quite understand. "Er, yes, the police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The, er-um, the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days anyway." I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm and, strangely, no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy brimmed sun-hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multicoloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near six foot six inches of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand. Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee-injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other, but it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing - and righteousness. We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gents' toilet on the in-field, where the rest of the riff-raff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us. We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies; me an alien from the old country and him raging against the coming of the light. "Fuck them, Ralph," he would say, "we are not like the others." Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas we tried to cover the America's Cup yacht race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get on to Richard Nixon's blacklist) from a three-masted schooner. There was a rock band on board for distraction; booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin [magic mushroom], a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray-paint canisters. "What do I do with these?" "You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multimillion-dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are." "How about fuck the Pope?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph?" "No," I replied, "it's just the first thing that came to mind." So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat and while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land. There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey, but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today. I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy. See also: Fear and loathing at the Book Festival: Ralph Steadman on Gonzo  Remembering Hunter S. Thompson: Gatling guns, loose hogs and editing By David McCumber Seattle Post-Intelligencer The Gizzard of Darkness. Nixon and the Whale Woman. Bad Nerves in Fat City. Doomed Love in the Rockies: Hunter Stockton Thompson was, among other things, a great headline writer. Each of those lines topped one of the columns the inimitable Doctor Thompson wrote in the halcyon days of the San Francisco Examiner, and each of them, for me, is a memory of angst, exhiliration and exhaustion, in roughly that order, from the time when I "edited" Hunter's work. "We are, after all, professionals," he would say, calmly, after having tortured another deadline to the last possible second before the press began to turn. A day after his shocking death, I know those memories will mean more and more as I go about my duties in a Hunterless world. It will be weird, knowing when the phone rings at 4 a.m. that it really is bad news -- good news always waits 'til noon, as they say -- and not Hunter. He used the telephone like a weapon, and usually at an hour when the mortals he associated with, like me, were attempting sleep. It's a good reporting technique, and he used it well that way, too. He had great sources, and he certainly wasn't afraid to use them -- at any hour. Witness the last column he wrote for ESPN.com -- a wee-hours phoner with Bill Murray. Most of the time, he simply wanted to share a laugh. As savvy and skeptical as he was as a journalist, it's easy to forget his almost boyish sense of fun. Sometimes, it meant firing .22 tracers from his hand-crank Gatling gun across the Woody Creek-Lanado Road when he got irritated at the traffic, or blowing an old Jeep pickup into thousands of pieces of flaming shrapnel on his back forty. Sometimes, it meant posing in his hot tub with Mona, an inflatable doll -- the only one of her plastic ilk, I'll bet, who earned a book dedication ("To Mona, who made this outburst possible"). Sometimes, it meant driving crazy-fast through a blizzard with the top down in one of his two ancient red convertibles, negotiating four-wheel skids on icy curves while fiddling absently with the stereo, trying to get the lyrics to the Cowboy Junkies' "Where Are You Tonight?" Or posting crude steel vultures with glowing red eyes at the top of his driveway, or scattering dozens of plastic cockroaches in his refrigerator, or setting a large, live hog loose in a friend's restaurant dining room. At the same time, his accomplishments as a journalist and literary lion were monumental. He will be remembered with the likes of Twain and Mencken -- and should be. Thompson's early work was searing: the seminal book "Hell's Angels," followed by "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," the drug-soaked epic that made his name and has been adapted twice to the screen. Then came his brilliant journalism in Rolling Stone, including reporting from Vietnam, from Chicago in 1968 and from the campaign trail in the next six presidential elections. Perhaps most memorable of this work, for me, was his endorsement of Jimmy Carter, which was at the same time hard-nosed and hilarious, and probably played a significant role in Carter's election. His analysis of why the Dukakis campaign was in trouble was equally absorbing and prescient. Later, he covered such disparate cultural events as the Super Bowl and the Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial with the same fluid, inimitable, weirdly eloquent writing style. And the columns -- boy. What a ride. Back in '85, everybody at the Examiner figured Hunter's column would last maybe three weeks before it blew up in a bloody froth of disputes over deadlines, editing and expenses. (One of Hunter's truisms about journalism: "Given money for expenses, anything is possible.") Indeed, he and editor Dave Burgin clashed quickly -- and publisher Will Hearst decided somebody more expendable than the editor of the newspaper should handle Hunter's column, or that's the impression I got when he ominously invited me into his office to discuss being Hunter's new "control." When I said, "sure," Hunter burst out of Will's bathroom, fell to the floor, did 10 pushups, then grabbed two tumblers, filled them with scotch, jammed one into my hand, shook the other hand, and the hog, as he would say, was in the tunnel. He would write the column for five years, three of them with a little help from me, and the best of them would make a book, "Generation of Swine," that sold a quarter-million copies in hardback. Thanks, Hunter, for the past 20 years of friendship -- and for the incredible prose that will forever define the generation that somehow lost its grip on the American Dream. You were, after all, a professional.  As Gonzo in Life as in His Work By Tom Wolfe Opinion Journal Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised. The Addams-family eyebrows in Stephen King's book jacket photos combined with the heeby-jeeby horrors of his stories always made me think of Dracula. When I finally met Mr. King, he was in Miami playing, along with Amy Tan, in a jook-house band called the Remainders. He was Sunshine itself, a laugh and a half, the very picture of innocent fun, a Count Dracula who in real life was Peter Pan. Carl Hiaasen, the genius who has written such zany antic novels as "Striptease," "Sick Puppy," and "Skinny Dip" is in person as intelligent, thoughtful, sober, courteous, even courtly, a Southern gentleman as you could ask for (and I ask for them all the time and never find them). But the gonzo -- Hunter's coinage -- madness of Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1971) and his Rolling Stone classics such as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" (1970) was what you got in the flesh too. You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime. I had never met Hunter when the book that established him as a literary figure, "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga," was published in 1967. It was brilliant investigative journalism of the hazardous sort, written in a style and a voice no one had ever seen or heard before. The book revealed that he had been present at a party for the Hell's Angels given by Ken Kesey and his hippie -- at the time the term was not "hippie' but "acid-head" -- commune, the Merry Pranksters. The party would be a key scene in a book I was writing, (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I cold-called Hunter in California, and he generously gave me not only his recollections but also the audiotapes he had recorded at that first famous alliance of the hippies and "outlaw" motorcycle gangs, a strange and terrible saga in itself, culminating in the Rolling Stones band hiring the Angels as security guards for a concert in Altamont, Calif., and the "security guards" beating a spectator to death with pool cues. By way of a thank you for his help, I invited Hunter to lunch the next time he was in New York. It was one bright spring day in 1969. He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions. Hunter didn't so much have a conversation with you as speak in explosive salvos of words on a related subject. We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam's apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, "What's in the bag, Hunter?" "I've got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds," said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. "No, never mind," I said. "I believe you! Show me later!" From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn't clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water. The next time I saw Hunter was in June of 1976 at the Aspen Design Conference in Aspen, Colo. By now Hunter had bought a large farm near Aspen where he seemed to raise mainly vicious dogs and deadly weapons, such as the .357 magnum. He publicized them constantly as a warning to those, Hell's Angels presumably, who had been sending him death threats. I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand. When we reached the tent, the flap-keepers refused to let him enter with the whiskey. A loud argument broke out. I whispered to Hunter. "Just give me the glass and I'll hold under my jacket and give it back to you inside." That didn't interest him in the slightest. What I failed to realize was that it was not about getting into the tent or drinking whiskey. It was the grand finale of an event, a happening aimed at turning the conventional order of things upside down. By and by we were all ejected from the premises, and Hunter couldn't have been happier. The curtain came down for the evening. In Hunter's scheme of things, there were curtains... and there were curtains. In the summer of 1988 I happened to be at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland one afternoon when an agitated but otherwise dignified, silver-haired old Scotsman came up to me and said, "I understand you're a friend of the American writer Hunter Thompson." I said yes. "By God -- your Mr. Thompson is supposed to deliver a lecture at the Festival this evening -- and I've just received a telephone call from him saying he's in Kennedy Airport and has run into an old friend. What's wrong with this man? He's run into an old friend? There's no possible way he can get here by this evening!" "Sir," I said, "when you book Hunter Thompson for a lecture, you have to realize it's not actually going to be a lecture. It's an event -- and I'm afraid you've just had yours."  Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was. Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language. George McGovern Thanks Gonzo Journo for Calling Him 'Best of a Lousy Lot' Editor&Publisher March 3, 2005  One of the vehicles Hunter S. Thompson rode to fame was the 1972 presidential election, which he immortalized -- not always in a factual manner -- in his classic "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail."Today, in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, the antiwar Democratic candidate that year, George McGovern, who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, thanked the late writer for at least calling him "the best of a lousy lot" in that race. "Thompson's position," McGovern wrote, "was that I was 'honest' -- except for one 'wicked moment' when I attended Nixon's funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. 'Yeah,' Hunter told me, 'you went into the tank with that evil bastard.'" McGovern also recalled that Thompson had printed on the jacket of "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" a photograph of the two of them with the caption: "Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination." In retrospect, "I wish I had," McGovern concluded. "Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively." Gonzo but not forgotten By George McGovern The Los Angeles Times March 3, 2005 As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was "the best of a lousy lot."  Thompson's position was that I was "honest" -- except for one "wicked moment" when I attended Nixon's funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. "Yeah," Hunter told me, "you went into the tank with that evil bastard."Hunter relished such frightful words. "Evil," "wicked," "fear and loathing." These were the words that described the world best for him. Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: "Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing." On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: "Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination." In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively. It's true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn't everything. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter's book "the least accurate and most truthful" of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race. Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called "this fucked-up country." What I didn't get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original — a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson.  Hunter Thompson (1939-2005) and the Art of Listening By Al Giordano Narco News Bulletin Two months after Authentic Journalist Gary Webb checked out, an elder statesman of Authentic Journalism does the same: Hunter S. Thompson is dead, and therefore immortal. The grandfather of “gonzo journalism,” he taught us: "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long." (For those of you scratching your heads asking, “Who was Hunter Thompson?” here’s a link to a Denver Post obituary that is surprisingly comprehensive and fair.) I met Hunter Thompson just once, in 1976 when he was at the height of his fame. He was in New Hampshire covering that year’s presidential race, the first since the publication of his bestseller about the 1972 elections, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. I expected to meet a flamboyant, loud, and extravagant party animal dancing on the head of the establishment to the rhythm of the frenetic clickety-clack of his manual typewriter keys. To the contrary, as I, starry-eyed, watched him conduct his craft the thing I noticed most of all -- the unexpected thing that elevated his entire concept of journalism for me -- was that he was, above all, a painstakingly attentive listener… Thompson created for himself a public persona of a wild man; a scary, gun-slinger, drug-taker, and irreverent defiler of social norms. I believe to this day that it was mainly a journalistic technique: to throw everyone off their carefully-constructed scripts and then be able to observe – and report – the essence of the characters: the politicians, the reporters, and everyone else he encountered while chronicling what he called “the death of the American dream.” He would hit them with behavior that nobody expected from a journalist, and then sit back, listen to them wail, watch them flail, and tell the tale as it really was – not according to the agreed-upon steps of the American political dance. It was January or February of 1976 – I was a lad of sixteen – in the Concord, New Hampshire office for Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris’ presidential campaign. Harris, with his calls for a “redistribution of wealth and privilege” was decidedly an underdog (he came in fifth in that first-in-the-nation primary). Not a single political reporter took the campaign of “Fightin’ Fred” seriously, and I’m sure that Thompson had no illusions, either, that the country was ready for a political leader who titled his manifesto The New Populism. Thompson walked up the stairs to the second-floor campaign headquarters on a snowbound North Main Street, with a back room where we, a posse of young volunteers, slept on old mattresses or in sleeping bags on the floor after long days of trudging through neighborhoods and towns, knocking on doors, handing out literature, and talking up Harris’ “Take the Rich off Welfare” platform. We had a campaign song that would likely be banned from any U.S. political campaign today: Take the rich off welfare Bust up monopolies Break up the oil and gas crowd Bring the big boys to their knees President Fred Harris His story we will tell We won’t just win the White House But our country back as well… He walked into the crash pad, not announcing his name, and sat down on one of the floor mattresses. He took out his pad and pen, and began asking quiet questions of the volunteers. He was polite, attentive, softspoken… in other words, the antithesis of his public image (that we, in those times, mainly got through his portrayal as a drug-addled “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip that was a mainstay of daily newspapers back then). After an hour or two, one of the other volunteers whispered, “do you know who that is? It’s Hunter Thompson!” There he was: no booze, no guns, not apparently suffering from hallucinations… just a reporter, asking questions, taking notes, letting his sources speak, and evidently listening… and then listening some more. I am guessing that he felt sufficiently at home among this ragtag band of idealist campaign volunteers that he didn’t see a need to bounce off the walls in the grand acts of theater that so many today remember aloud of him conducting in the practice of his craft. Anyway, that’s the Hunter Thompson I remember from one short exposure to the man: a listener… a reporter… And as Hunter said to a public audience on the sad April night, years later, in 1989, when news had spread that Abbie Hoffman had committed suicide: “He lived courageously and he died with his boots on.” While everyone else was gnashing teeth or proclaiming assassination or some such thing, Thompson chose, rather, to simply salute the way the fallen comrade had lived. So before my email box runneth over with emails titled “HUNTER THOMPSON WAS M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D” and the similar nonsense that follows the frequent suicides of great men and women in a society all lathered up in denial that it has already, collectively, died, I’ll offer him the same worthy tribute: Hunter S. Thompson lived courageously… and he died with his boots on. In a meritocracy, his column, in place of being exiled to, of all places, the ESPN sports pages, would have been published in every daily newspaper. But it wasn’t. Those same newspapers are today penning obituaries and eulogies to Thompson’s public persona, and none of them seem to “get” that the joke was on them. But, now that all has been written and done from his outpost in the mountains of Woody Creek, Colorado, I’d like to point out that Hunter S. Thompson was a better listener than all of ‘em – and that is what made him the most unique observer of “the death of the American dream.” The dream is dead inside those borders, and this is especially true of the journalism sweatshop in which he labored. There simply wasn’t a shred of dream left for him to cover. And to those who follow, or wish to follow, in his gigantic footsteps, I’ll repeat: Look south, young Americans. After all, it’s no accident that Thompson himself cut his journalistic teeth as a Caribbean and South American correspondent before returning to the United States in 1963 with the hawk eyes able to observe the absurdity of a land that has forfeited the right to take itself anywhere near as seriously as it does. He killed the king named “objectivity” and created the model of a journalist as a sniper and sharpshooter, rather than a mere obedient foot-soldier of false norms and decayed politesse. And it was Hunter Thompson’s subjectivity – in defiance of the doctrine of journalistic objectivity that some dinosaurs, the walking dead of the profession, still practice – that made him interested enough in his subjects to be able listen authentically… and to therefore be able to observe and chronicle history as it really was and is -- messy, tumultous, and above all, human -- and not merely as the weak-minded control freaks who call themselves "objective" want it to be.  Party's Over by Corey Pein Columbia Journalism Review A famously irresponsible gun owner, The Doctor had plenty of weapons to choose from, and he no doubt put some thought into which one he would use to end his life. The inspired works of Hunter Stockton Thompson may be forgotten, as legions of hacks fight to claim his memory for their side. (And they will, inevitably. They fight over anyone whose words mattered but isn't around to speak for themselves.) Whether it was righteous indignation or simply a superhuman metabolism that fueled his adventures, what made Thompson's writing so powerful was his honesty: About his sometimes-malicious desires, about the self-destructive pandering tendencies of a pseudo-objective press, about the times as he saw them. After the 1972 presidential campaign, which he covered for Rolling Stone as an open advocate for McGovern, Thompson wrote: This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. As for the "profession" -- a word Thompson would have derided -- itself, he was equally ruthless. Here's his capsule description of television news operations (one clipped and saved by more than one talking head): [A] cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. Whatever you think of his opinions, Thompson's honesty is something all writers could stand to emulate -- even inverted-pyramid traditionalists who fear the royal "I," and straight shooters who might look at a man with such a chemical diet and wonder whether he could possibly be human. But for it all, Thompson was, as his partner Ralph Steadman accurately depicted, a man among reptiles. A loaded and freakish and lonely man, but a man still.  Shutting The Door, Painting The Windows Black By Kurt Loder MTV In the 1970s, Hunter Thompson inspired a legion of young journalists to believe that the best way to cover a story was to get tanked to the gills on drugs and alcohol, present oneself in a state of near-psychotic meltdown at the scene of whatever one was covering, and record the affronted and sometimes violent reactions of the people one encountered. Concepts like "facts" and "objectivity" were to be regarded as quaint, if not entirely notional. The author became the story. This was "gonzo journalism." What Thompson himself never felt the need to point out — although other practitioners of what at the time was called the New Journalism, like Tom Wolfe, were quick to note it — was that his gonzo style rested on a foundation of solid journalistic experience. (Although he hadn't actually graduated from high school, Hunter had studied journalism at Columbia University, and he later worked for such publications as Time and the New York Herald Tribune.) Getting loaded didn't make you a journalist; nor did it make you a talented writer (another key requirement of the style). Getting loaded, in the case of most of his many young admirers, simply made them loaded — a time-honored way of avoiding the annoying work of actually sitting down to write the story. Hunter had immersed himself in the California biker culture to write a 1967 book called "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs." (Still a good read today.) But his later gonzo style only began to emerge in a 1970 article for Scanlan's Monthly called "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." Returning to his home town of Louisville to cover the annual horse race, Thompson had been teamed for the first time with Ralph Steadman, an English illustrator with a spattery, apocalyptic style. "Neither of us had brought any strange illegal drugs," Thompson wrote, "so we would have to get by on booze." Hunter was subsequently assigned by Sports Illustrated to go to Las Vegas and cover something called the Mint 400 motorcycle race. He took along an associate, Oscar Zeta Acosta, a 250-pound Chicano legal-aid lawyer. They rented a car for the trip, and used Hunter's expense money from the magazine to stock its trunk with, as he later wrote, "two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls." Sports Illustrated rejected the resulting story, but Hunter kept writing down his feral impressions of the Vegas trip ("Pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood ..."), and he eventually took this material to Rolling Stone magazine — possibly the only outlet where such surreal ravings could have been published at the time. The editors loved what he'd written, and told him to keep going. Then, as he was finishing up the piece, they sent him back to Las Vegas to insert himself into a convocation on narcotics and dangerous drugs organized by the National District Attorneys Association. This seemed like a perfect Thompson event, and indeed it turned out to be. Hunter's very long chronicle of his two Vegas trips — with Thompson billing himself as "Raoul Duke" and Acosta described as his "300-pound Samoan attorney" (much to his later irritation) — was published in two parts in Rolling Stone in November of 1971. It was titled "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," and it was blazingly illustrated by Steadman in a raw and horrific manner reminiscent of the German expressionist painters George Grosz and Otto Dix. Thompson's writing was exhilaratingly warped and free-associational, and the tone of the piece was unforgettably set in its now-famous first sentence: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." "Fear and Loathing" made Hunter Thompson a star. He went on to gonzify the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone in a series of dispatches called "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail." And then ... well ... The melancholy fact is that Hunter pretty much peaked in the early '70s. The ensuing years — rife with drugs and alcohol, in quantities he never tried to hide (and may in fact have exaggerated a bit) — largely brought collections of his classic magazine pieces ("The Great Shark Hunt," 1975) and his later, somewhat desultory newspaper columns for the San Francisco Examiner ("Generation of Swine," 1988). But while the flair continued to glimmer in his work, and a lot of the self-revving hostility remained, his style congealed into tiresome bombast. At the end, his main outlet was the ESPN Web site, "Page 2." What happened? Well, times change, of course; and it's hard to imagine a time less like the rampaging '70s than the one we now inhabit. Drugs must have played a part, too. (A friend of Thompson's once told me, sadly, "Cocaine turns your brain to cement.") But he was a unique and passionate American writer, and he opened up the practice of journalism to new experiences and new ways of seeing things. Unfortunately, he also opened it up to unenlightening self-dramatization on the part of younger writers who lacked his gifts. Nobody wrote the way Hunter did, but many were misguided into trying to do so by what he implied were his methods. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone," he once quipped, "but they've always worked for me." For him, maybe. But Thompson also knew that his singular talent wasn't really a function of his vaunted dissipation. The way he actually cranked out the copy, as he said in a 1974 Playboy interview, was quite basic. "One day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore: You shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer." Hunter Thompson: The last words By P.J. Corkery The San Francisco Examiner The Mitchell Brothers, proprietors of the O'Farrell Theater, that Carnegie Hall of carnality, grew fond of Hunter Thompson when, in a spell of rest from politics in the late 1970s, he became a louche lizard and worked as the night manager of their strip mall. So the Mitchells' production crew filmed a "documentary" about Doc. The 40-minute flick has lain about, largely unedited and unscreened, for years. But you can expect to see it shortly. ... At Tosca on Wednesday evening, friends began the work of establishing a Hunter Thompson Foundation to give out awards -- think of them as Pulitzer Prizes for edgy journalism -- to keep the gonzo genre alive and kicking. Look for Johnny Depp and gonzo publisher Bruce Anderson to be involved. ... Then, sometime in March, reports his friend Jeanette Etheredge, San Francisco will put on a grand farewell for Thompson, who lived and wrote in Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown, the Richmond, North Beach. ... On March 10, the Edinburgh Castle's lit'ry salon holds a "hallucinatory wake." ... The lit-crit corner: While Thompson's work for Jan Wenner's Rolling Stone (then headquartered down at 625 Third St.), seemed as casually stream-of-consciousness as anything by Kerouac, it was deliberate. Thompson was a journalist who crankily respected the opinion of other craftsmen. Marty Nolan was one of those craftsmen. Marty, a former contributor to The Ex and my fellow Bostonian, e-mails: "I knew the doc from way back, when he was in the employ of Dow Jones, writing for the National Observer. ... But I first met him on a bus in New Hampshire, where we talked about his earlier stuff. ... 'You read Rolling Stone?' he asked. 'Yeah,' I replied, 'but Jesus, why is your stuff so tedious? Why do you bury the lede so laboriously?' ... 'Tedious?" he asked. 'Yeah,' I replied, 'that's the word.' When he sent me a letter, he signed it, 'Tediously yours.' "Of course, after that," Nolan remembers, "I was his buddy, shepherd, mentor, whatever the hell else. I got him into the White House during Nixon's final days (a feat trickier than scrubbing 'Jeff Gannon'). In San Clemente, I introduced him to (Nixon Press Secretary) Ron Ziegler, with whom he talked about motorcycles, and (Nixon supporter) Rabbi Korff, with whom he talked about the Old Testament. Priceless. ... "And Bill Cardoso's coinage of the word 'gonzo,' despite the French angle mentioned in your Wednesday column, P.J., is strictly Hub patois, more Southie-Dorchester than Haight-Ashbury. ... Cardoso, once a Boston Globe editor, wrote 'The Maltese Sangweech' a while back. He is quite gonzo himself. As is Dave Burgin, twice editor of The Examiner, who hired Hunter at some risk in 1985, while Ex higher-ups blanched and stammered. But the doc delivered. ... "When Hunter disappeared for days on a run to Tijuana, his editor, agent, wife, everyone but his bail bondsman, called me," Nolan writes. "'Don't worry, he'll be back,' I said. And so he was. Alas, not long enough." He left the words, though. To new readers today, the rambling, wild accounts of politics and mayhem lack the spark, the contemporary shock, they had back then. But if journalism is to animate the conversation of the day, which is what Thompson believed it should do, it later must seem ephemeral. He believed in the newspaper as conversation piece, not as draft of history. Yet his words, particularly when he was in mad, wise-man voice, speak to ages. ... Herewith, a few aphorisms from the doc: "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." ... "Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect." ... "If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past 10 years, about 600 people -- including me -- would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." ... "I take no pleasure in being right in my dark predictions about the fate of our military intervention in the heart of the Muslim world. It is immensely depressing to me. Nobody likes to be betting against the Home team..." One hopes that last Sunday evening, with no games left to bet on that day, he wasn't too depressed when he picked up his gun. I think that it was his broken physical situation, not the nation's, not the world's, not journalism's, that led him to that awful act. His life having become a whimper, the doc's cure was to end it with a bang. But if the last two days are any sign, in death he becomes the focus for a huge cultural battle. Not bad for a guy who once stood on Market Street, trying to get manual work as a day laborer when the editors wouldn't hire him... 'Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen... ' The UK Guardian Hunter S Thompson's death has left a gaping hole in the ranks of American counter-culture. Thompson fan Kate Taylor reflects on the events of his singular life, and his ongoing influence on writers today.  Click image to see whole comic page "By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died." On hearing that Hunter S Thompson, the maverick voice of American counterculture, had been found dead at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, friend and fellow-author Martin A Lee described his death as "sad" but "not surprising". The mood among commentators following the announcement of his death this morning was equally resigned: the subtext to the many radio and television reports of his apparent suicide was that such an act was a fitting, if tragic, end to a remarkably singular life. And Thompson's life was nothing if not surprising. He famously and fully embraced an unconventional lifestyle, summing up his attitude to fast living with the iconic phrase: "I do not advocate the use of dangerous drugs, wild amounts of alcohol and violence and weirdness - but they've always worked for me." His house was most famously home to a collection of peacocks, but he allegedly also kept a keg of gunpowder in his basement, and on one occasion accidentally shot an assistant. His major foray into public life occurred in 1970, when he decided that "there might be some serious fun in politics" and duly stood for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on a platform of drug decriminalisation. The Republican candidate sported a crew cut, which prompted the contrary author to shave his head entirely and refer to his rival as "my long-haired opponent" throughout the campaign. He lost by a handful of votes. Thompson began his career in journalism in 1956, working as a sports reporter for the base paper at Eglin air force base in Florida. By all accounts, the strictures of army life did not suit the man who once described himself as "a dangerous drunken screwball", but after his (honourable) discharge he stuck with journalism. While writing for various magazines, he produced two serious novels (Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary) and numerous short stories, none of which were published until his break came in 1966 when he pitched an article to Harper's Magazine about his time with the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, then associated with lurid rumours of murder and gang-rape. After that he had little trouble persuading Rolling Stone magazine to serialise what became his best known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The novel, subsequently made into a film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, is the first-person account of a trip to Las Vegas. In a skewed take on the road trip genre, the narrator-journalist and his companion aim to cover a narcotics convention and a motorcycle race, but are sidetracked by a search for the American dream, assisted by a colourful palette of substances (LSD, ether, adrenochrome and ibogaine to name a few). This powerful, absurd tale of self-destruction soon became a psychedelic classic and delivered Thompson a cult following, as well as founding his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. It also epitomised the way in which Thompson's life and writing were intertwined. His conviction that: "truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen" lead him to invent a style of journalism to which he gave the soubriquet 'gonzo': a vivid, outlandish blend of fact and fiction in which the writer features prominently. In Fear and Loathing, the narrator and his "300 pound Samoan" attorney companion are barely-disguised versions of Thompson himself and his friend and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta. Following the publication of Fear and Loathing, Dr Thompson (the doctorate apparently arrived by mail order at some point during the 60s) has remained embedded in America's cultural consciousness, his prose and lifestyle both condemned and celebrated by ensuing generations. A self-styled political and social commentator, he described his journalist's "beat" as the death of the American dream. His follow-up to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, a savage and subversive account of the US presidential electoral process in which he preempted the verdict of the Watergate scandal saying that "Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise". His latest book, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, The Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004) is equally forthright about the current administration. When asked in an interview about the modern impact of fear, the commodity inevitably linked to his name, he replied: "This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11 ... But I don't think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things, of responding to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance." Hunter S Thompson thoroughly adhered to his own belief that "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used". In 2003 he was asked if, in spite of regularly proclaiming its demise, he hadn't in some sense lived the American Dream itself. "Goddammit!" he replied, dismayed. "I haven't thought about it that way. I suppose you could say that in a certain way I have." Thompson saw himself in the tradition of great American iconoclasts - Hemmingway, Twain, Mailer, Kerouac - even naming his son after F Scott Fitzgerald. For many, the 'new journalism' movement of the 1960s, a forthright style associated with writers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, reached its peak in his searing, snearing prose. His nihilistic energy skewered the unique insanity of the 1960s, and while some felt that he lost his focus in later years, his influence is undeniable. PJ O'Rourke and Timothy Edwards Jones are acknowledged descendants, but his arrogant poetry resurfaces today in everything from Will Self's novels to Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. The crazed journalist at the heart of his own investigation is now a commonplace - some might say too commonplace - but what gave Thompson such lasting appeal was his whole-heartedness, the conviction behind all the posturing which still feels genuinely revolutionary. When asked in a recent interview if he had any regrets, his response was dimissive. "Those I have are so minor. Would I leave my Keith Richards hat with the silver skull on it in the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn't do that again. But overall, no. I don't have any regrets."  'I've gotta get my elephant tusks back' The UK Guardian Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them. It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading Loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit, man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..." And so on. A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says. Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip. "Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.' "I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'" His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America. That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations. Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there. Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character". He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create. I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs. "There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug." His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!" Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America. "He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.) Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it. "I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling." He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight. As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things. I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long. Like Icarus, Hunter Thompson flew a little too high By Billie Stanton Tucson Citizen Only by inhaling enormous quantities of ether, guzzling quarts of tequila, whiskey and beer, and ingesting massive doses of LSD, mescaline, cocaine and any other drug at hand could a mourner do justice to the death of Hunter S. Thompson. But therein lies the catch, for only Thompson himself seemed able to withstand decades of such self-destructive behavior and remain somewhat, sometimes, sentient. Until he committed suicide with a bullet Sunday night, that is. Loyal readers, and fledgling journalists of the '60s who pined to dive into the gonzo journalism he created, now can only juggle grief and fury, that odd combination evoked by all suicides. His "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was the second and last book that ever prompted me to laugh out loud. But I didn't believe a word of it. He enjoyed chemical "enhancement," sure, but the wretched excesses he described constituted a physical impossibility. Or so I thought, until the late, great Dodie Gust set me straight. A longtime Tucson writer, Dodie had known Hunter in Aspen long before he gained fame. And she insisted that he could, indeed did, regularly ingest major amounts of toxic cocktails that would have leveled anyone else on earth. Stoned to the gills and beyond, she recalled, he then continued to walk, talk, write beautifully and blast firearms at targets only he could see. Paired with his inestimable talent came a rare courage that led him to loiter too long with the Hells Angels, to take on the most crooked politicians with acerbic, stabbing wit and wisdom and - most important during his era - to carve out a whole new kind of reporting that contradicted everything we had been taught. Hunter didn't stand by as an observant, allegedly objective reporter. He inhaled his subjects and spewed them back out; he stalked them like prey. He - unlike anyone before or since - became the story. George Plimpton he wasn't. He was so much, much more. Hunter Thompson wrote like an angel for years. And he enchanted us. Later, he infuriated us. During my own little straight-laced career in journalism, he would appear in any given town where I was working, only to climb onto the stage so stoned as to render himself a public embarrassment - and an enormous disappointment. During many years in Denver, I had his home telephone number in Woody Creek on my source list. I doled it out to reporters a time or two, when he would run for sheriff or get arrested for some stupidity. But I never dialed it myself. The genius I had veritably worshipped for innumerable paragraphs and pages had imploded. And I, like many, many others, couldn't bear to see it. Still, his suicide is a shock. We more optimistic and naive loyal fans from yesteryear somehow continued to hold out secret hopes that someday, some way, he would recover his scathingly sacred talents and use them to ridicule our new mode of authoritarian government as only he could do. He seemed to recapture some of his former brilliance upon the death of Richard Nixon, his longtime nemesis, when he penned a piece for Rolling Stone magazine. That was dead news, though, and he never could muster that old gusto to throttle Dubya in the manner that many of us wished he would. Perhaps we all expected too much of Hunter, who proved to be a mere mortal after all. But when those sizzling comets streak across the sky - the van Goghs, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds - what observer can help but want to capture and savor their light a little longer? Like the firefly in the jar, though, some of the greatest talents shine only when fully free. And far too many cannot manage their freedom safely. Thus did Hunter die, I suspect, without two functioning brain cells left to rub together. Besides the brilliant literature he wrought, his legacy includes a cautionary tale. Many of us will miss him. But the tragedy, ultimately, is that we've already been missing him for years.  Hunter S. Thompson, doctor of gonzo journalism, died on February 20th, aged 67 The Economist There were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson's farm in Woody Creek: .44 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, black snubnosed Colt Pythons with bevelled cylinders, .22 calibre mounted machineguns. He also kept explosives, to blow the legs off pool tables or to pack in a barrel for target practice. His quiet bourgeois neighbours near Aspen, Colorado, complained that he rocked the foundations of their houses. Explosions were his speciality. Indeed, writing and shooting were much the same. His very first newspaper story, written when he was ten for a neighbourhood newsletter in Louisville, Kentucky, was headlined “WAR!” (“The Voits declared war on Hunter's gang on Oct. 1, 1947. At 3.00 Hunter's gang attacked the Voits”). Later, as a working journalist, he fired off reckless fusillades of words that were meant to shock and entertain and wreak collateral damage. He had always been a problem, kicked early out of high school (drinking, vandalism) and rapidly out of the air force, but his casual smashing of the rules of American journalism happened more or less by accident. Assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970, his mind was too blown with drugs, as usual, to write the story. One by one, with his trembling hands, he ripped the pages of whiskey-fuelled ramblings out of his notebook and sent them to the printer. The piece that resulted, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” was a runaway success, though he had neither described the race nor mentioned the winner. And he was astonished: it was like “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.” A friend called his style “totally gonzo”. The name stuck, though, as he confessed, nobody knew what the hell it meant. For the literary, he could explain that it followed William Faulkner's dictum that “the best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism.” Mr Thompson stalked, rifle in hand, cigarette (in holder) dangling, on the wild borderlands between fact and fiction, leaving readers to decide what was true and what was not. Editors tried to control him, but failed. Journalistic objectivity was a nonsense to him; he threw it away, and turned his gaze on himself. He and his excursions into depravity became the central and only theme of every story he wrote. Sent to Puerto Rico for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1959, he shot rats at the San Juan city dump until he was arrested. Assigned in 1971 to write a 300-word caption on the Mint 400 motor-cycle race for Sports Illustrated, he wrote the 50,000 words of mayhem that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. It began: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Posted to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, he never watched the boxing. Instead he floated naked in the hotel pool, into which he had thrown a pound and a half of marijuana, and let the green slick gather round him. “Fear and Loathing” made him famous: so famous that the Republicans came courting him, although he was a Democrat. It was not just the guns, but the fact that he wore a twisted sort of patriotism on his sleeve. That journey through the Californian desert to find fame and fortune, stocked up 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 a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers”, was also, Mr Thompson claimed, “a classic confirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character.” (“Jesus! Did I say that?”) Nixon's men wondered if this madman could be their bridge to the alienated, war-hating young. But they were playing with fire. Mr Thompson thought Nixon a liar and a bastard. He covered the 1972 election in typically take-no-prisoners style, producing what one campaign aide called “the least accurate and most factual” book about it; and when he toyed with politics it was on the Freak Power ticket, running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, where he could blow things away in the woods. He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or did, but there was a thoughtful side. Early in his career, in an obituary of a friend, he wrote of “the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” He was often melancholy, and wild conviviality and celebrity made no difference to that. The epigram to “Fear and Loathing” quoted Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” It was not thought surprising that his death was a suicide. In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world: It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun. Hunter Thompson was a gonzo world unto himself By Ed Bumgardner The Winston-Salem Journal March 3, 2005 Hunter S. Thompson once inadvertently, but succinctly, summed up his own demise: "Kill the body and the head will die." Nobody who followed the life of arch-author Thompson should be surprised at the news that Thompson stumbled off this mortal coil Feb. 20 at his home in Aspen. Shocked, yes, but not surprised. Thompson was a literary innovator, as twisted as he was brilliant. He abused every substance suitable for abuse, and a few that weren't. If anything, it was surprising that Thompson lived to 67. His ravenous appetite for vile potions, powders and elixirs, fuel for the muse, had long led to pondering over when Thompson's antics would end in overdose. That he did not die by overdose was shocking. Thompson took his own life with a gun. A successful lunge for the Great Skyhook. He had expressed that, upon his demise, his body be cremated and the ashes blasted into the void. Blasted in life, blasted in death. So perfectly Thompson. Thompson led a self-destructive life. That is self-evident. It can also be argued, convincingly in lieu of his work, that his self-destructive ways were also what allowed him to thrive, to celebrate and challenge life. He lived to view the world through altered states, then chronicle his reality. His world raced between rounds of intellectual dodgeball and twisted, drug-addled madness. High risk on the low road, and Thompson loved the low road. Peacocks couldn't live at his altitude. His seminal works of the early 1970s, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, gave birth to a new movement in journalism, the hazy emergence of a new strategy, a balance of training and terror, fear and loathing. Literati called it New Journalism. Thompson countered with "gonzo journalism." - pretzel logic from the bowels of the American nightmare. He crawled with lepers, leeches and lawyers - and loved it. Thompson was an investigative reporter, but he rarely told the story he was assigned in any known conventional manner. His narrative writing was such that he became an integral part of the tale. In most cases, his personality superseded the assigned tale to lurchingly steer it into uncharted territory. The resulting story was crammed with various theories, observations, rants, raves and anecdotal absurdities that ricocheted about like bullets fired in an elevator. To Thompson's credit, it was also generally funny, socially provocative and insanely inventive. It just wasn't what was assigned. Or was it? His works scaled heights only Thompson could reach. As he once famously wrote, "When the going got weird, the weird turn pro." It serves well as his epitaph. "Gonzo" and Thompson were inseparable. "Gonzo" gave Thompson free license to prowl the earth, ingest supernatural amounts of substances, write what and how he pleased and generally spew his weirdness to the delight of a generation. As a result, he became a literary godhead for young, adventurous adults who came of age under the shadow of Richard Nixon, Vietnam and hippie gobbledygook. In turn, Thompson gave "gonzo" legitimacy, a place in the modern lexicon. Reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas became a rite of passage, Jack Kerouac's On The Road for a new generation. Greensboro resident Parke Puterbaugh is a freelance writer and a former senior editor for Rolling Stone. He went to work there as a copy editor in 1979, and had occasion to handle Thompson's copy. "You really didn't touch Hunter's copy," Puterbaugh said. "I would not have dared. For all Hunter's craziness, he was a schooled professional journalist His copy was readable and clean." Puterbaugh ran into Thompson during his stay at Rolling Stone. His most memorable encounter came one night when Puterbaugh was alone in the Rolling Stone offices in New York. "I was blasting an album I was reviewing, and next thing I know there is the head of Hunter Thompson in my doorway, sunglasses on, cigarette holder bobbing, asking me in that peculiar cadence of his to turn it down." Puterbaugh was also assigned to go through the early archives of Rolling Stone in search of material for the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame. Next to hand-written letters from John Lennon and Charles Manson were the original proofs for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The book first appeared, serialized, in Rolling Stone. The proof was covered in hand-written corrections and asides from Hunter. "It gave me chills," Puterbaugh said. "And it also made me laugh, as there were also letters from Hunter. One had him complaining that he couldn't possibly meet his deadline unless he was sent drugs. No drugs, no copy. Hunter's ideas of deadlines were never the same as anybody else's." In time, Thompson's persona grew to mythical proportions that his talent could no longer meet. Two movies were made about his life - the woeful Where The Buffalo Roam and the suitably wired-and-weird, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as a dead ringer for Thompson. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau created a character, Raul Duke (a Thompson alias), that was clearly based on Thompson, who was not always amused. And Thompson wrote songs with the late Warren Zevon. When Zevon was dying of cancer, Thompson pledged that while Zevon was still alive, everything he wrote would contain a reference to his fellow guerrilla fighter. He kept his word. The references didn't always fit, nor did they always make sense. Then again, they weren't necessarily supposed to. Canon roars for Hunter S. Thompson By Michael Conniff Aspen Daily News From a literary standpoint, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was one of a kind, with a pair of quintessential "Fear and Loathing" achievements under his belt that left the journalistic academy with unbounded respect for - and unending wariness of - his reportorial alchemy. But journalists and journalism professors agree that Thompson's legacy in New Journalism - subjective reportage that sometimes sublimated objective fact to fictional techniques - is based on a small percentage of his work from the 1960s and 1970s, including the seminal "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." Thompson, 67, committed suicide at his Woody Creek home Sunday. "That's the thing about these shooting stars," said Stanford University journalism Professor David Weir, an editor at Rolling Stone magazine when Thompson was publishing his most famous work there. "It's not so much what Hunter did but how the audience reacted. That voice resonated - but then the world continued to change. Hunter Thompson was still Hunter Thompson. Maybe his readers grew up but he didn't. Like Peter Pan." "His importance in my mind was such a long, long time ago," explained University of California at Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Journalism David Littlejohn. "There's no question 'Fear and Loathing' altered many writers' perceptions of what was possible - and the ways of incorporating new lifestyles, new attitudes, new perceptions into a kind of reporting that still in the end seemed honest. Norman Mailer had done some of this with the march-on-the-Pentagon book ('Armies of the Night'). Thompson just pushed it one step further. It seemed to me the campaign trail book and the Las Vegas book were fair game for what he called his 'bad craziness.'" "When I went to journalism school," said Cynthia Gorney, Cal-Berkeley associate professor of journalism, "Thompson's stuff was very popular, but I didn't like it much. I don't think I really paid enough attention to him. I just tended to dismiss it and a lot of people do not." Even those who paid close attention to what Thompson called "gonzo journalism" found that acolytes were noticeably absent, as if only Thompson and no one else could pull it off. "Of course I read him in the early years in Rolling Stone like everybody else," said Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism Associate Professor David Foster. "But I don't teach it, mostly because my students are going to newspapers and magazines to do long-form journalism but probably not first person. They're in that other stream of journalism. I've never had really good experiences using his pieces as the basis for discussion in journalism class. It's so different than everything they've read and they don't get the joke. They don't know why. It's cultural. It's generational. And it's much more noticeable now." Littlejohn was dismissive about Thompson's work after the two "Fear and Loathing" books and a famous piece the doctor did about the takeover of the mountain town of Madeira, Cal., by a group of Hell's Angels. "I tried to read his things after that," Littlejohn said, "but I just don't think his manner, his style, his attitude worked. I used those two ('Fear and Loathing') books with very large classes. But nothing after that. We're talking about a very short bright shining moment when he mattered a lot. After that, no. It clearly was a mode of the 1960s early 1970s, a period piece, a relic of its time." Littlejohn said his students "were obviously alert to his willful exaggerations - the drug dreams or fantasy - the mountains of drugs, the horrible things they did." But that, too, may have been more fiction than fact in Hunter Thompson's heyday. David Weir, a former Rolling Stone editor, remembers how hard Thompson worked on the campaign trail in the 1970s. "He was right there on the front edge of the movement to break down the voiceless journalism," Weir remembered. "He was a little older than the baby boomers so we all looked up to him. If you read the early stuff, the motorcycle stuff, the impression is he was on drugs but most of that was a pose. ... He was working his ass off, and what he did took an enormous amount of effort. He developed this character and this conceit, but when he did his best work he was sober. He revealed it all in his letters." "Mailer once said people call me crazy but maybe you've got to be crazy to know what's happening in the United States today," Littlejohn said. "Wouldn't you think the current administration would generate as least as pointed a response? But I don't see that. These things are accidents of genetics and timing and background. It would be nice right now to have Mailer at his best or Thompson at his best, wouldn't it?" "We've Gone from Bad to Worse to Rotten" Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo By Alexander Cockburn Counterpunch I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson. Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes. I tried to re-read Kerouac's On The Road a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That's a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he'll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I've been sipping into his diaries, Confessions of a Barbarian, and laughing every couple of pages. "Writing for the National Geographic," Abbey grumbled, "is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts." Could Thompson have written that? Probably not. When it came to sex and stimulation of the synapses by agents other than drugs or booze or violent imagery Thompson was silent, unlike Abbey who loved women. Thompson wrote for the guys, at a pitch so frenzied, so over-the-top in its hyperbolic momentum that often enough it reminded me of the squeakier variant of the same style developed by his Herald-Trib stable mate and exponent of the "New Journalism", Tom Wolf. In their respective stylistic uniforms they always seemed hysterically frightened of normalcy, particularly in the shape of girls, so keenly appreciated by Abbey. Thompson's best writing was always in the form of flourishes, of pell-mell bluster wrenched from himself for the anxious editors waiting well past deadline at Scanlans or Rolling Stone, and in his later years often put together from his jottings by the writers and editors aware that a new "Fear and Loathing" on the masthead was a sure-fire multiplier of newstand sales. Overall, Thompson's political perceptions weren't that interesting except for occasional bitter flashes, as in this sour and prescient paragraph written in 1972: "How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960--and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same." There's nothing much to the notion of "gonzo" beyond the delighted projections of Thompson's readers. The introduction of the reporter as roistering first-person narrator? Mark Twain surely did that, albeit sedately, and less sedately we had Henry Miller, another man who loved women, pushing the envelope far further than Thompson. (Which of the road books will last longest between Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Kerouac and then Thompson drove faster but they didn't write better.) Norman Mailer took the form to the level of genius in Advertisements for Myself, with political perceptions acuter and writing sharper by far than anything Thompson ever produced. "Gonzo" was an act, defined by its beholders, the thought that here was one of Us, fried on drugs, hanging onto the cliff edge of reality only by his fingernails, doing hyperbolic battle with the pomposities and corruptions of Politics as Usual. And no man was ever a more willing captive of the Gonzo myth he created, decked out in its increasingly frayed bunting of "Fear and Loathing" "The Strange and Terrible", decorated with Ralph Stedman's graphic counterpoints. Like Evel Knievel, Thompson's stunts demanded that he arc higher and further with each successive sentence's outrage to propriety, most memorably in his obit for Richard Nixon: "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin." Kerouac ended sadly at 47. As Abbey nastily put it, "Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism." Abbey himself passed gloriously at 62, carried from the hospital by his pals to die at his own pace without tubes dripping brief reprieves into his veins, then buried in the desert without the sanction of the state. How about Thompson? His Boston lawyer George Tobia Jr told the Globe the 67-year-old author sat in his kitchen Sunday afternoon in his home in Woody Creek, Colo., stuck a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth, and killed himself while his wife listened on the phone and his son and daughter-in-law were in another room of his house. His wife had no idea what had happened until she returned home later. Seems creepy to me, same way Gary Webb blowing his brains out a while back with a hand-gun was creepy. Why give the loved ones that as a souvenir? I suppose Thompson's message was: We were together at the end. Webb was truly alone. He lifted the curtain on one little sideshow of the American Empire, and could never quite fathom that when you do that The Man doesn't forget or forgive. Thompson engaged The Empire on his own terms and quit the battlefield on his own terms too, which I guess is what Gonzo is all about. The origin of 'fear and loathing' Editor's note: Hunter S. Thompson wrote this letter the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas, using, for what is believed to be the first time, the phrase "fear and loathing" to describe his horror at the tragedy. This letter was reprinted in the Aspen Daily News on the 40-year anniversary of JFK's assassination, courtesy of Dr. Thompson. To: William J. Kennedy November 22, 1963 Woody Creek I am tired enough to sleep here in this 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. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today's murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic 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 grasp what Gatsby 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 killing 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 elections 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 feel 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. There 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, any 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. Nose Hair And Hunter By Greg Palast Scoop (New Zealand) It was Princess Di's photographer who told me to shave the hair on top of my nose. That was when I was famous, famous for a whole week. I was famous only in England, an island off the coast of Ireland, but it was fame nonetheless. The entire front page of the Mirror, a London tabloid newspaper, was splashed with a ghastly photo of my head (hair on nose, not on head), an attacking my investigation of Tony Blair. My own paper, the Guardian/Observer, wanted to give a different impression of me, so the editors spent an ungodly sum of money to hire Princess Di's photographer to make me pretty for a large photo spread of their own. But there was nothing much the lens man could do. "Get rid of the nose hair," he suggested, working, without success, on the 200th snap. I met Hunter Thompson when I was twenty years old; that is, saw him from the back of a crowd at the gym at my college where he was performing. I say "performing" because that's what Thompson did, even three decades ago. He'd become an astonishing success as a writer -- and his writing was astonishing. Then he became very accomplished at success and stopped accomplishing much as a writer. That's when I decided not to become a journalist. If that's what a journalist does, I thought, I'd rather do something a little more interesting with my life. I switched to the hospital administration program with a plan to open a community health center in Woodlawn, then the hardest of the hard-core poverty troughs in Chicago. Things didn't work out as planned; and twenty-five years later I ended up a reporter. Thompson ended up as a cartoon character. No kidding: "Transformer," the bald-headed comic book journalist hero, drinker, druggie, smart-aleck scourge of bad guys and editors. That was the comic book; then there's the man. Thompson the writer kept writing in bits and snips, but it was always a parody of Thompson. His later compilations (he couldn't sustain a book) like "Generation of Swine" were brilliant one-joke rants. You'd read them and you didn't know a goddamn thing you didn't know before you read them. Thompson stopped taking on the big topics -- after all, what topic could measure up to him? It wasn't always that way. What impressed me about "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is that it was written as a coda, a needed break, from Thompson's grueling investigative report on the death of Chicano activist Ruben Salazar. And this I also know: all that cool fear-and-loathing patter was not written on acid in a Ghia doing 140; it was typed alone in a quiet room. Alone in a quiet room. No school gyms of adulating audiences on their feet to cheer the genius, no comic book figures dropping bon mots could press those keys. And then came the satanic sucker-punch, celebrity. Poor Mr. Thompson. When I think of how my one goofy week of offshore stardom twisted my head (I'm still neurotically plucking hairs off my nose), I can only imagine what Thompson's daily dose of fame cocaine did to him. When I go off track, when I catch myself obsessing about my number on the Times' paperback nonfiction list, I wrestle my thoughts back to Tundu Lissu. Tundu's the lawyer who followed up on my investigation of the deaths of 50 Africans in George Bush Sr's gold mines. They were buried alive and Lissu brought back the evidence for which he was arrested and charged with sedition by the government of Tanzania. Released from prison, he refuses to seek refuge and safety. Tundu Lissu is a giant. I barely reach his knees, that is, as a moral being. But I can do one thing: tell his story to the world -- and keep myself out of the way. When a writer gets bigger than his subjects, he's dead -- though not yet buried. This morning, I heard that Thompson faced this intractable truth, and completed the job; suicide with one of the guns he toyed with for the cameras. Goodnight, Mr. Thompson. And thanks for those astonishing words, no matter what they cost you. Farewell to fear and loathing Nilanjana S Roy The Business Standard (India) Hunter S Thompson shot himself this week, before I could slide over to his "fortified farm" outside Aspen, complete with peacocks and an awesome collection of rifles, shotguns, and revolvers, and say thank you. We used him to deprogramme impressionable young Indian journalists who'd been told to read the New York Review of Books and the TLS, and worse still, The Guardian, for pointers on style. "You want to know what style is, ja?" we'd say to some quaking, innocent youngster who could still recite Alfred Noyes' The Highwayman, complete with clip-clop sound effects. "You want to know how REAL journalists do it? Then read this." And we'd roll out the first lines of the original Fear and Loathing, the one that had the Duke and his 300-pound Samoan attorney careening across America on the ultimate road trip: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." As they lapped up their first taste of gonzo journalism like starved kittens at a saucer of mescaline-laced cream, we knew that nothing in their lives would ever be the same again. Either they would pack it in and become overpaid accountants at a white-collar corporate house or we would soon hear the faint, pitiful sounds of screaming from insomniac sub-editors faced with the prospect of cleaning up a report on changing cabotage laws written by a bright young thing who now believed in Thompson's only-the-paranoid-survive and "there is no such thing as objective journalism" mantras. Thompson saw himself as the last American outlaw long before he became one. He had an early run-in with the FBI at the age of nine over the question of purloined mailboxes, which left him with a healthy paranoia and a conviction that the law could be outsmarted. When he grew up -- if he ever did -- he covered the Hell's Angels from the inside, pointed out to America that Nixon was the Antichrist and the first sign of the US' impending nervous breakdown, and famously, late on a deadline, sent off his beer-whisky-tequila-and-assorted-drug-fuelled notes instead of a proper article, pretty much making up gonzo journalism as he went along. He offered to inflict grievous bodily harm on too many people to count, spawned too many fear-and-loathing inspired knock-offs to count, bust up too many parties to count -- including one thrown by Rolling Stone for him, where he discovered and wielded a fire extinguisher to such effect that he was barred from the bash, despite being the guest of honour. He remained permanently angry till the end: angry at America, at Bush, at the fact that his country had been taken over and muzzled by a combine made up of the military, the police, and government. And paranoid. After following presidents around on the campaign trail, after exploring the counterculture and becoming its voice, after innumerable run-ins with the law ("The law changes and I don't -- I consider myself a road man for the laws of karma."), he knew that reality was stranger than paranoia. Hunter S Thompson became something of a parody himself towards the end; by the time the Duke arrived on Garry Trudeau's comic strip, Doonesbury, as The High Lord of Inner Space, he had descended into cariacature. Like an old bull still baited by the odd yapping dog, he could be trusted to fulminate on demand; he wrote sports columns for ESPN, and invented the game of Shotgun Golf in his last one; he had been played by Johnny Depp in the official Fear and Loathing movie. The end he had imagined for himself was spectacular -- he envisaged going down in flames in one way or another, though his favourite exit plan involved a speeding motorcycle in a crash. We thought, at 67, that he would go out snarling, grumbling, truculent; we didn't really believe that he would put the final period himself to the swaggering, rambunctious, pugnacious sentence of his life.  Mahalo, Dr. Thomspon By Gideon Yago MTV Nothing sucks quite so much as finding out that one of your heroes has killed himself. In high school, they tell you most suicides are cries for help, but not the ones with guns. Those are the professional jobs, when the person intends to get it right. Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain: nothing tragic-romantic there, just dedication. And now there is another to add to the roll. Details will come out about the circumstances surrounding Hunter S. Thompson's death, but the irrevocable fact is that a light is out, a necessary voice has been snuffed, and we are all worse off. I first read Hunter Thompson's "Hell's Angels" when I was 16 years old, at one of those impressionable times when my best friends were my books and records. It was one of those epiphany, Paul at Damascus moments, where you realize that there is no need to play by the conventional rules, that the conventional rules are just somebody else's ruse, that you're alive and can make it up as you go along. The words had trajectory, color and thrust. The rogue eye of the man who wrote them was keen, cynical, honest and American. The last lines of "Hell's Angels" are as liberating an experience as hitting the open road. The myth of Thompson often precluded his work. Lord knows how many American benders begin with some swig or hit of something and someone whispering, "Buy the ticket, take the ride." Walk through the long plastic hallways of any television station and someone is guaranteed to have the "Generation of Swine" salvo about TV being "a long plastic hallway filled with pimps and thieves where good men die like dogs" tacked up in defiance. There were the Bill Murray and Johnny Depp pictures, both great, but his words themselves are what matter most as they are the best, if not the most honest portraits of American cultural madness. No icon was safe, no target off limits in his narratives that braided politics, money, sports, race, sex, drugs and weirdness together. In 2000, having just read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," I walked into my job here at the MTV, intent on looking for the wild ritual he saw in the Nixon/ McGovern race. When the towers went down, his Page 2 Web site posting was prophetic and wise. I read his writings from Saigon while on the roof of the Remal Hotel in Baghdad, watching just another war buckle below. But that's it now. Now there's nothing more. One bullet and it's all syndication from here on out. Thompson didn't think much of our generation, one he dubbed "Generation Z" and called "born rich & Powerful, the certified Aristocrats of a new & Amazing century ... gilded little sots." He blamed the young for the war and Democratic failure of the last election. We gave him no hope in his final days. But those of you who pick up his works and travel through his words may prove him wrong, for there are great truths there. Sometimes the vantage point from the edge of reason gives the clearest perspective of all. Mahalo, Dr. Thompson. Hope it looks spectacular up there.  Thompson's career was more than just a party; His gonzo legacy began with writing, transcended persona By Michael Taylor The San Francisco Chronicle If gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson were around to hear the encomiums heaped on him Monday by the cream of America's journalism academies, he might well blush, have another shot of Wild Turkey, and then let loose with a weird and scatological screed decrying the kind of establishment wisdom he made a colorful career out of lampooning. Thompson, who was 67, died in his Rocky Mountain home Sunday of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo. Over the past three-plus decades, Thompson carved out a unique name -- in truth, it was a persona -- as an outspoken writer who broke the rules of the so-called no-rules New Journalism by not only writing the story, but also by injecting himself so much into the narrative that he became the story. Thompson with the Hells Angels. Thompson in Las Vegas, stoned beyond stoned. However you look at his work -- his magazine pieces for Rolling Stone, his books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and others -- Thompson, who has been compared to such fellow iconoclasts as H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain, had a profound impact on how journalism in the United States was practiced in the latter third of the 20th century, according to journalism school deans and fellow journalists. Even though many remember Thompson's mordant character and zany behavior as much as his writing, it was the writing that was the key thing, the important thing. "At the beginning, when we all began to read this incredible stuff, there was this brilliance, and the undeniability of it as a voice with a point of view," said Terry McDonell, managing editor of Sports Illustrated and a friend and editor of Thompson going back 25 years to the days of Rolling Stone and Esquire. "This came directly from the writing." McDonell said "it was a very popular thing" to say that "maybe he really didn't have the chops, and maybe it was entirely theater. You can make that argument, but you are not remembering the force of that work when it came upon us. In that (presidential) campaign in '72, every news organization had their writing (influenced by Thompson's work). He changed the culture of journalism, writing, everything. People wanted to be like him." And he leaves a legacy that, some say, will last for a long time. "There's a place for a Hunter Thompson in the modern scheme of things," said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. "There's always a place for someone like that." Schell noted dryly that the "news establishment, like any institution, gets encumbered with taboos, rituals, formalities and a lot of pretension." So in comes Hunter Thompson, Schell said, "and it doesn't hurt a bit to have someone who owes no one anything and is not seeking to curry any favor or avoid any sticky wicket, someone who is just outrageous, who will speak what cannot be said in polite company." Thompson reveled in that kind of thing, going on writing binges fueled by whatever substance came to hand, taking on the sacred cows and skewering them with sentences he intentionally made dark and weird and riddled with fear and paranoia. To some, that style simply typed him as a cartoon character. But Robert Gunnison, who worked for former Sen. George McGovern in his losing presidential bid in 1972, said Thompson, who would later produce "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," was one of a tiny number of reporters who clearly understood "a tricky parliamentary maneuver the McGovern forces executed at the (Democratic) convention. It was referred to as the South Carolina challenge. "It escaped most of the national press, but Thompson laid it all out in Rolling Stone, exactly what happened," said Gunnison, who later was a political reporter for The Chronicle and is now director of school affairs at UC Berkeley's journalism school. "It was a brilliant piece of reporting, not the kind of thing he would be noted for. He had a real appreciation for how politics worked." But that was 30 years ago and on some campuses today, Thompson may be something of an anachronism. "Is he a hero at Columbia Journalism School?" asked Nicholas Lemann, the school's 50-year-old dean. "Sadly, I think no. He's much more a hero to my generation of journalists. He's sort of a giant, but I don't think rising young journalists are reading him with the same degree of admiration." Nonetheless, Lemann said, Thompson's legacy can be seen in the fact that he was one of those media stars created by the campaigns, much like author Theodore White, famed for his quadrennial "Making of the President" books. If White was the straightforward traditionalist, Thompson was the "weird, alternative type voice," Lemann said. "That was clearly his slot. And the closest thing to it (today) is the bloggers." In the larger scheme of things, however, Lemann and others freely compare Thompson to Twain, the 19th century humorist who delighted, as much as did Thompson, in taking potshots at the establishment. "Thompson was always going against the conventional, in thinking and writing and journalism," said Twain biographer Justin Kaplan. "There was something distinctly and proudly subversive about him, as there was about Mark Twain, and we certainly need people like that." Kaplan said Thompson "shook up the way journalism is done. He said the Hunter Thompsons of the world are few and far between in today's journalism, a business that "doesn't seem to have a hell of a lot of backbone these days. It's corporate journalism that doesn't encourage this kind of oppositional or satirical writing." For some, Thompson's body of work is writing that will last. Thompson "brought to journalism the power of a strong voice and was an important force in shaping what was then called the New Journalism, with a point of view and narrative form that affected journalists of his generation and will be continued to be read by people of our time, much like we continue to read people like Mark Twain," said Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the University of Southern California-Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. "He created vivid scenes and vivid people," Cowan said, "and (his work) will continue to be assigned by faculty members for years to come, and read widely in anthologies of great reporting." He will also be remembered, however, for the Hunter Thompson who craved guns, motorcycles, big red convertibles and ingestible substances of most kinds. "It doesn't surprise me a bit that he took his own life, because that role is a very tough one, the role of the professional iconoclast," said Schell, the UC Berkeley journalism dean. "It's lonely, and it's not a very collegial one, like (being) Galileo or Martin Luther. By all accounts, he was a prickl pear and not a very happy person. It's difficult to always be at odds with everything." No scotch-tasting? No coffee?!?! By Doug Moe The Capital Times March 18, 2005 ...I had to explain that I was not a scotch person, having had a singularly unfortunate experience with Johnnie Walker Red Label on my 18th birthday, which in those days was when you could drink legally. This was at a restaurant called the Hatch Cover (today Captain Bill's), and it was bad enough that I have only had scotch once in the 30 years since. That one time was a special occasion, in 1989, when the famous gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who died last month, was in Madison to speak at the Barrymore. I had been asked to introduce Thompson that night at the Barrymore. Part of Thompson's legend was that he was sometimes less than punctual, but my friend Bill Dixon, a Madison attorney and close friend of the writer, had assured me Thompson would be there. Bill was sure because he'd booked Hunter on four consecutive flights into Madison. As I recall, Thompson was only a little late getting to the theater, but he immediately barricaded himself in a dressing room in the Barrymore basement with a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch, and refused to come out. He didn't feel like talking, he said, but he offered me a hit off the bottle of Chivas. Naturally, I took a slug. I figured drinking with Hunter Thompson was like playing golf with Jack Nicklaus. Eventually, after Dixon agreed to go on with him, Thompson took the stage, carrying a large bat-like piece of wood. He would not speak, he said, but he would take questions. The first question had something to do with the point spread of an upcoming football game. Thompson was giving an in-depth analysis of the game when a woman in the crowd cried out: "You're a brilliant man! Why are you talking about football?" At which point we learned why Thompson had carried the bat onstage. He picked it up and slammed it on a table. It sounded like a small explosion. "Who's in charge here?" Thompson snarled. An interesting evening...  Guns, gonzo and whiskey By Nancy Lofholm and Troy Hooper The Denver Post Columbo was like many of the patrons having a wake of sorts inside the bar who had been shot, shot at or threatened with shooting over the years by the tavern's most iconic customer. But being at the wrong end of Thompson's firearm didn't interfere with the friendship that folks in this woody draw - miles and attitudes away from the fur-coat core of Aspen - shared with Thompson, who shot himself in the head with a .45-caliber handgun in his kitchen Sunday. "He told me he was going to shoot my dog if he messed with his peacocks - and he did," said Jimmy Ibbotson, Columbo's owner, Thompson's longtime friend and neighbor and lead singer of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. With a pause just long enough for a swallow of Thompson's favorite beer, Molson, he added: "Hunter was a great neighbor and a great friend." Friends crowded Monday into the funky tavern where Thompson long had claimed a corner stool and where paperback-toting fans of his gonzo journalism had flocked to catch a glimpse of their hero. In recent years, his visits had lessened. He would come in only late at night, said tavern owner Shep Harris, after other patrons had left and he could pull out his trademark cigarette holder and light one up in violation of the smoking ban. Friends puzzled over his suicide Sunday evening. The fact that he turned a gun from his large arsenal on himself shocked some. Others said the 67-year-old writer had been in poor health and mentally struggling with that for several years. He had broken a leg and a hip in the past several years and walked stooped and with a limp. His fascination with weaponry was well known. In addition to Thompson's penchant for firing guns from his back porch, a bomb squad from the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office went to his home on Super Bowl Sunday to take away a keg of gunpowder. "I wasn't surprised. I knew (his death) was going to happen eventually," said George Stranahan, a friend of 35 years who sold Owl Farm to Thompson and is an owner of Flying Dog Brewery. Others said they considered it par for the course that Thompson, a prolific writer and a man who took words to dizzying heights, left no suicide note. "If he would have left a note, it would have probably read something like 'Whoops!'" said longtime friend Gaylord Guenin. He had witnessed Thompson's famous prowess with a firearm when Thompson walked into the tavern late one night, pointed a big-barreled gun at Guenin and fired a blank. Thompson's death rattled the town and went round the world within hours of Thompson's son, Juan Thompson, finding the body in the always-cluttered kitchen of the home Thompson called Owl Farm. Juan Thompson told investigators he heard a sound he thought might be a book dropping and went to check on his father shortly before 6 p.m. Anita, Hunter Thompson's wife of nearly three years, was not at home at the time. His grandson was the only other person in the house. When Thompson's body was taken from the home by hearse, Juan Thompson placed a CD of favorite songs that Hunter had edited and titled: "Where were you when the fun stopped?" in back of the hearse with the body. On the CD were "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Mother Maybell Carter and some songs by Warren Zevon. Thompson's family remained in seclusion as security guards stood under two scrap-metal buzzards perched on either side of Thompson's driveway. Presidential historian Doug Brinkley was flying to Aspen on Monday night to act as a spokesman. Meanwhile, testimonials flowed as freely as the Molson and Chivas did at the Tavern. "Dr. Thompson indelibly transformed journalism with his gonzo flair, but we should remember that his best stuff was rooted in reporting and sharp- eyed observation," said Walter Isaacson, president and chief executive of the Aspen Institute and former managing editor of Time magazine and a former top executive at CNN. "He sure stomped the earth, but he also knew how to write sentences that, because of their deft embedded clauses and personal riffs, and the way they were juxtaposed with short declarative eruptions, had a syncopated rhythm that delighted the ear." Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, one of Thompson's closest friends, said, "The family is hugging, huddling and supporting each other through a different time. There's been literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, admirers and people all over the world. ... Woody Creek will never be the same." Hunter Stockton Thompson Born: July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Ky. Married: Sandra Dawn, May 19, 1963 (divorced in 1980); Anita Beymuk, April 24, 2003 Children: One son, Juan Education: Journalism, Columbia University Career: Time, Caribbean correspondent, 1959; New York Herald Tribune, Caribbean correspondent, 1959-60; National Observer, South American correspondent, 1961-63; The 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; candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, 1968; executive director, Woody Creek Rod and Gun Club Books: Among his writings, "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga"; "The Curse of Lono"; "Generation of Swine"; "Better Than Sex"; "The Proud Highway"; "The Rum Diary"; "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist." Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2004 Denver Post Research Librarian Ann Feiler Former Editor Recalls Hunter Thompson as Newspaper Columnist Editor & Publisher While Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide this past weekend, was best known as a magazine and book writer, and as the model for a "Doonesbury" character, he also worked at times as a newspaper columnist. One of his old editors, Larry Kramer, former CEO and chairman of Marketwatch and now an executive at Dow Jones, wrote an appreciation/recollection at the Marketwatch site. An excerpt follows: "When I became Executive Editor of the San Francisco Examiner in 1986, I inherited Hunter as our lead political columnist, once a week. He had been hired by my predecessor Dave Burgin, and had already worn out his welcome with several line editors, who almost killed themselves trying to get his column into the paper. I found the same problem, and every once in a while, when all the usual suspects had quietly slipped out of town, I would take the Sunday night duty of cajoling Hunter to get his Monday column to the desk, and would often have to edit it right on deadline, which was about 4 a.m. Monday morning. "I had heard thousands of stories about what a wild character he was and every time we met in person, he never failed to live up to his billing. The first time we met, he arrived an hour late for a dinner we had planned in a suburban Marin County restaurant. He showed up with a gym bag that had a bright pink Day-Glo tag which read 'Firearms.' He had flown to San Francisco with special permission to carry a bag loaded with weapons, including a knife and gun. (This was pre-9/11, of course). "He immediately set off for the bathroom for a long period of time. When he returned and sat down he ordered two large scotches... 16 ounce glasses filled with some pretty old stuff. He downed them both in seconds. The dinner had just begun. He then proceeded to captivate all of us around the table with his predictions for the upcoming elections. "Sometime later I had the occasion to visit him in Woody Creek, Colorado. We agreed to meet for dinner at the Snowmass Resort Clubhouse, not far from his home. He was about an hour late for this one, too. "But that didn't slow him down. He showed up with his newest assistant, a stunning 19-year-old Russian lit major from Princeton, I think, who had taken a semester off to live and work with Hunter in Woody Creek. They drove up in the biggest Cadillac I'd ever seen, and he proceeded to plop down at the table and order two bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne -- despite the fact that I already ordered a couple bottles of very expensive Chardonnay. Silly me. "He had several appetizers and at least two main courses, and when the desert tray rolled by, he glanced at the dozen or so deserts being offered and with a theatrical wave of his hand said: 'I'll take one of each....wrap 'em up.' Then he left for the bathroom. Half an hour later his assistant said maybe we should try to find him. After a quick pass at the men's room, I found him at the bar singing with a bunch of visiting German sailors. I have no idea what they were singing, and I'm quite confident that neither did Hunter. "The only time I ever heard him humbled was one Sunday night after midnight. He was returning my call. I had been trying to reach him to get his column in. Unfortunately, my wife Myla answered the phone from bed before I could get to it. She lit into him like no one ever had, calling him a prima donna who didn't care about anyone but himself. While I listened with my mouth open to the floor, she hung up before I could grab the phone. "Half an hour later the column arrived on my fax. It was terrific as always, but two or three hours earlier than he usually got it in. I learned later from someone who was with him at the time that he was stunned by her diatribe and quietly went back to his typewriter and banged the column out." Hunter Thompson's Political Genius By John Nichols The Nation Norman Mailer had the best take on Hunter Thompson's passing. "He had more to say about what was wrong with America than George W. Bush can ever tell us about what is right," mused Mailer upon learning of Thompson's suicide. Anyone who read Thompson knew that the so-called "gonzo journalist" was about a lot more than sex, drugs and rock-and-roll -- although it is Thompson who gets credit for introducing all three of those precious commodities to the mainstream of American journalism. The gun-toting, mescaline-downing wildman that showed up in Doonesbury as "Uncle Duke" was merely the cartoon version of an often serious, and always important, political commentator who once said that his beat was the death of the American dream. Thompson was to the political class of the United States in the latter part of the 20th century what William Hazlitt was to the English poets of the early 19th century: a critic who was so astute, so engaged and so unyielding in his idealism that he ultimately added more to the historical canon than did many of his subjects. Thompson taught me how to look at politics -- his book on the 1972 presidential campaign, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, remains the one necessary campaign journal of the era -- and I cherished him for that. (When I was writing a book on the Florida recount fight of 2000, I wanted to pay homage to Thompson so I asked him if we could use one of his brilliant "Hey Rube" columns to remind readers that no crime was beyond the imagination of the Bush brain trust. Thompson, who referred to George W. Bush as "the goofy Child President" and saw the Bush family as a recurring cancer that plagued the American body politic, leapt at the chance to be part of the project. He continued to delight in Bush bashing, titling a column published at the time of the 43rd president's first inaugural: "Abandon All Hope.") But Thompson also taught me how to do politics. Thompson was a journalist in the traditional sense of the craft and, as such, he was entirely unwilling to merely observe the wrongdoings of the political class. He wanted to create a newer, better politics -- or, at the very least, to so screw up the current machinery that it would no longer work for the people who he referred to as "these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today." In 1970, fresh from covering the assassinations, police riots and related disappointments of the 1968 presidential campaign, Thompson waded into the fight himself as a "pro-hippie, anti-development" candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, which included the ski town of Aspen. Thompson wanted to win, in order to save what was still a rural, live-and-let-live county from the influx of Hollywood stars, corporate hoteliers and the rest of the elite entourage that would make it nation's premier ski resort. But he also wanted to teach a lesson about politics that would have meaning far beyond Colorado.  Thompson ran on what he and his backers dubbed the "Freak Power" ticket, declaring in an advertisement in the Aspen Times that, "(In) 1970 Amerika a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all - not in the literal sense -- but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition -- but nothing changes. So now, with the rest of the nation erupting in a firestorm of bombings and political killings, a handful of "freaks" are running a final, perhaps atavistic experiment with the idea of forcing change by voting..."At a time when many of his contemporaries were disappearing into a drug haze, or shouting silly "Smash-the-State" slogans, Thompson was exploring a more radical prospect. He wanted to combine "Woodstock vibrations, New Left activism, and basic Jeffersonian Democracy with strong echoes of the Boston Tea Party ethic" into what the writer-candidate referred to as "a blueprint for stomping the (conservative Vice President Spiro) Agnew mentality by its own rules -- with the vote, instead of the bomb; by seizing the power machinery and using it, instead of merely destroying it." The experiment was not an immediate success. But Thompson did win the city of Aspen and took 44 percent of the vote county wide. In fact, only a last-minute deal between the Democratic and Republican parties pulled together enough votes for the incumbent sheriff to beat the "Freak Power" candidate. But, as Thompson noted, "the Aspen campaign suddenly assumed national importance as a sort of accidental trial balloon that might, if it worked, be tremendously significant." As it happened, even in defeat, the campaign proved significant. Because of all the national attention accorded Thompson's campaign, the blueprint was noted by "new politics" candidates and activists around the country. They won power in college towns such as Berkeley and Madison and Ann Arbor, and eventually in communities that were threatened by commercial and real estate pressures similar to those that were the target of Thompson's Aspen campaign. Indeed, even in Aspen, Thompson's politics would eventually win out -- in the mid-1990s, he organized a campaign that successfully blocked a plan by the Aspen Ski Company to expand the local airport to accommodate jetliners that were designed for "industrial tourism." Hunter Thompson once said that, "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." And, when all the rumination about his adventurous approach to drugs and guns is done, there will remain the blueprint for that better politics that Thompson was wise enough and idealistic enough to believe might yet redeem the American dream. Recalling Hunter S. Thompson from his fearless heyday By Steve Terrell The New Mexican "'When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road running, it is only a matter of time before he gets smashed' and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand." — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 1972 was a major year in my personal political development . It was the year of my first antiwar demonstration at The University of New Mexico — an adrenalin-charged and tear gas-soaked week that still gets me riled and antsy. It was the first year in which people between the ages of 18 and 20 were legally eligible to vote. I was 19, and I voted as part of that youth vote that some — wrongly — predicted would be huge enough to oust President Nixon. And one thing that helped make the year bearable were the regular mondo gonzo campaign dispatches from Hunter Thompson published in Rolling Stone. Thompson’s bad-craziness exit this week prompted me to pick up my well-worn first edition paperback (price tag: $1.75) of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, which I‘ve always thought to be his greatest work, despite the greater infamy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Reading all the praise and final respects for Thompson from mainstream press folk around the country struck me as ironic. Though Thompson had plenty of friends among nongonzo journalists, he didn’t think much of the establishment political press. “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists — in Washington or anywhere else they meet on a day-to-day basis,” Thompson wrote in the introduction of Campaign Trail. “When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in … especially for the ‘minor infractions’ of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.” Many of us envied Thompson’s fearlessness and reckless freedom shown in Campaign Trail. Who among us doesn’t fantasize about blurting out — in print — pejoratives like “evil swine” or “treacherous geek” or “corrupt old ward-heeler ” when describing some of the politicos we cover? (Note to politicos: You know who you are.) But while many of us admired Thompson, few, if any, actually emulate him either in writing or antics. Here in New Mexico, some of our judges come a lot closer to Hunter Thompson than our journalists. The ’72 race was Thompson‘s high-water mark for political writing . His subsequent stabs at writing about presidential campaigns seemed half-hearted and weary. I remember trying to trudge through his late ’80s book Generation of Swine, a collection of his columns about national politics. His observations there seemed like warmed-over conventional wisdom spiced up with familiar Thompsonisms like “money-sucking animals” and “greed-crazed lunatics.” Some believe Thompson by the end had become a sad parody of himself. Many believe his legendary drug and booze intake eventually fried his spirit and diminished his talent. But for one glorious stretch 35 years ago, Thompson single-handedly cut through the crap of politics and journalism, revealed disturbing truths and made his work seem like twisted fun. For that he should be honored. Local Community Remembers Hunter Thompson By Eric Flack WAVE 3 TV Some called him a genius. Others say he was disturbed. Louisville native and literary legend Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in his Colorado home Sunday night. Hailed as the father of "gonzo journalism," friends say Thompson always felt scorned by his hometown. WAVE 3 Investigator Eric Flack has more:  Hunter Stockton Thompson was a mystery, even to those who were closest to him."Sweet, big hearted and as good a friend as you'll ever have," said longtime friend and Louisville resident Ron Whitehead. "If you were ever a friend of Hunter's, you were always a friend. Then Hunter had the madman -- I mean the madman in him." Life on the edge began at an early age for Thompson. He was expelled from Louisville's Male High School in 1955, after being charged with robbery. Whitehead visited Thompson in his adopted home of Aspen, Colorado a number of times. But the mementos are now sad reminders. Like the picture Whitehead has of the two of them, in the kitchen where Thompson shot himself. He was famous for his love of guns, drugs, and in-your-face writing. Thompson's 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was the birth of what came to be known as "gonzo" journalism. That's where the author becomes a central character in his own story. "Hunter is looked at as this wild, crazy guy, that drank, and took drugs and raised hell," said Twice Told Used Bookstore Owner Harold Maier. "But more importantly, Hunter could write. I mean Hunter was a genius." Yet despite the many accolades, Thompson felt shunned by his hometown. "He never felt Louisville respected him, respected his work," Whitehead said. A 1996 tribute, featuring Warren Zevon and Johnny Depp, was his last trip home. "Hunter had a love-hate relationship with Louisville," Whitehead said, "and after this event he said I will never come back to Louisville again." And he never did, not even for his own mother's funeral at Cave Hill Cemetery a short time later. Now, it is the literary community in mourning, for the loss of an outspoken icon. "We don't have many voices left," Maier said, "so to lose one breaks my heart." "Hunter obviously felt that his work was done, and it was time to move on," added Whitehead. Hunter S. Thompson was 67 years old. Thompson's son discovered the body. There was no suicide note. Whitehead is planning a memorial tribute at the Rudyard Kipling sometime in March. From the Aspen Daily News archive  Author Hunter S. Thompson, left, is escorted out of the motorcade car of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at Aspen-Pitkin Co./Sardy Field Airport in Aspen, Colo. on Monday, June 21, 2004. The man at right is unidentified. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) "Just to put your minds all at ease, I have four words for you that I know will relieve you greatly," Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told a private gathering on Red Mountain. "How does this sound? Vice President Hunter Thompson." As it turns out, Kerry was a serious admirer of Thompson, the literary icon who lives in Woody Creek. He brought three hardcover copies of Thompson's 1972 cult classic, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," to have them signed, and invited him into the black sport utility vehicle that chauffeured him to a private fund-raising effort at local businessman Michael Goldberg's home on Red Mountain. "I was kind of a tour guide for him. We talked about the history of Colorado and I pointed out some sites," Thompson said later that afternoon. "We discussed assassinations, war, the Middle East, the Patriot Act, shooting guns in Woody Creek and riding motorcycles. I had fun with him." Generating headlines has never been difficult for Thompson, and this year was no different as his name regularly popped up during the presidential election. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, and others latched onto an Aspen Daily News article after the paper quoted Thompson as saying the presidential election was "another failure of the youth vote." Although he is in the latter stage of his career, Thompson continues to write books, columns and articles for some of the nation's biggest publications. The Aspen Institute hosted a book signing in August that attracted a large number of attendees who lined up to have Thompson sign his latest book "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk."- TH Fear and Loathing in Houston by Paul Zimmerman Sports Illustrated Some years ago I used to run a writers' handicapping pool. A buck a man, closest to the actual score takes it all. In 1974, Dolphins vs. Vikings in Houston, I was in the press room early, putting up my pool sheets on the bulletin board, and I saw this bald-headed guy squinting at the rules of the contest in a not-too-focused fashion. "I'm not a regular sports writer. You gonna let me in your pool?" he said. I recognized him as Hunter Thompson, whom I had read was covering that Super Bowl for Rolling Stone. "Only if you've got a buck," I told him. He assured me he had, so I told him to record his entry on the board. "How about more than one pick, under different names?" he said. All of a sudden it dawned on me that this was a guy who was going out of his way to seek rejection from authority figures, and that's what I, of all people, must have represented to him. "A buck a pick," I told him. "Make 'em good names." He liked that. A fellow outlaw. None of his picks came close, and when his piece came out, he had done a real hatchet job on the writers, "Rozelle's hand maidens," he called them, except for yours truly... Fear and loathing at the Nissan Open: Going gonzo with Hunter S. Thompson by Ron Sirak Golf Digest To hear Hunter S. Thompson tell it, he invented "gonzo journalism" out of total desperation. The good doctor, as he liked to call himself, had a deadline to make and nothing to write. Sort of like being a golf writer and having the tournament of the week endlessly interrupted by a rain front that apparently extended from Riviera Country Club to somewhere west of Krakatoa. While Thompson's connections to golf are minimal, and while the fact a golf writer should sing his praises seems a bit gonzo-ish, the good doctor would understand making a deadline. Desperate times stretch the definition of relevance. The truth of the matter, however, is that Thompson's contributions to journalism were enormous. His death Sunday of an apparent suicide at his Colorado home silenced one of the rarest of creatures: A truly original voice. According to Thompson -- and with Thompson you were never exactly certain where truth ended and fiction began -- he developed his stream-of-consciousness style in which he plopped himself into the middle of whatever he was writing about when he was sent by Scanlan's magazine to cover the Kentucky Derby. The article, as I remember, quickly abandoned the Southern civility of the mint julep and plunged headlong into the bottom of a bourbon barrel. It was apparently on the morning after the night before, with the haze of excess still shrouding his mind, that Thompson tried to put his thoughts on paper. "I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he said in a Playboy interview years later. "So I finally 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 write for anybody." Instead, his piece was greeted with rave reviews and hailed as a breakthrough in journalism. It was the beginning of a remarkable career that produced, among other works, the books "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" and "Hell's Angels." Thompson never pulled a punch. He not only wrote what he thought, he wrote what he felt. His obituary on former President Richard Nixon published in Rolling Stone in 1994 was entitled "He was a Crook" and contained this passage: "He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon." One of the last things Thompson wrote contained the humor and brutal irony for which he was noted. In this case the irony was unintentional. The piece, published earlier this month on ESPN.com, was called "Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray." In it Thompson details a late-night phone call with Murray in which the author asks the actor for advice on how to launch a new sport he has invented that combines gunplay and golf. "Last spring, the Sheriff and I played a game outside in the yard here," Thompson wrote. "He had my Ping Beryllium 9-iron and I had his shotgun, and about 100 yards away, we had a linoleum green and a flag set up. He was pitching toward the green. and I was standing about 10 feet away from him, with the alley-sweeper. And my objective was to blow his ball off course, like a clay pigeon." As with much of Thompson's writing, you can close your eyes and picture the scene. As with much of Thompson's thinking, he battered down barriers by combining two concepts as remote from each other as golf and skeet shooting. Guns were always a part of Thompson's life, as was alcohol and other mood-altering compounds, so much so that you wonder if the story he had mentally written for his own life ended with him dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound - alone - as he did. One of the first things I remember reading by Thompson was a piece titled "Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border" originally published in the National Observer nearly 40 years ago: "One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club - a five-iron, if memory serves - driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call a 'stylish pot' instead of a waistline. Beside him on the patio was a long gin-and-tonic, which he had refilled from time-to-time at the nearby bar. He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was in a residential section of the Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by white adobe blockhouses of urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the roofs - golf balls, 'old practice duds,' so the Britisher told me, that were 'hardly worth driving away.'" I don't know if Thompson ever really played golf, other than to hit balls from a penthouse terrace in Colombia or to shoot at golf balls struck by a 9-iron with a shotgun. He did have a Ping 9-iron, of that we are reasonably certain because at least he said he did. And that was the ultimate playfulness of Thompson: He challenged you to figure out whether or not he was telling the truth. In doing so he made you laugh. And in doing so he made you think. Even in death he made reality elusive. The Associated Press said he was 67 and The New York Times said he was 65. Hunter S. Thompson once said about golf: "The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be caught dead in otherwise." When I heard that the good doctor would no longer be in, I blinked back a tear, thought of that line and chuckled. I wondered what he was wearing. And I thanked him for a column idea on a rainy day. He would understand the irony.  Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw American Giant By Gene Gaudette American Politics Journal I was going through my e-mail last night when I noticed what looked like an innocuous enough item on the R S S feed from Eschaton: "Holy crap." Curiosity got the best of me, and I opened the item: RIP: ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture author of books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67. The words hit like a sack of potatoes to the solar plexus. An almost reflex-action check of Google News showed about a dozen entries for the same AP article, and one with a few more details from the Aspen Times. Hunter S. Thompson lived, wrote, and ultimately died of his own terms. He was the outlaw giant of American letters, a journalist and writer of tremendous gifts and perhaps even larger demons. He was, in many ways, a walking contradiction: and eloquent advocate of social justice, a scathing critic of crony politics, particularly those of his bête noire Richard Nixon — and, more recently, former Texas Gov. George W. Bush. At the same time, he was enamored of guns, which played a part in number of infamous, often harrowing, and sometimes funny anecdotes involving Thompson. Thompson has been greatly credited, along with authors such as Ken Kesey and Gay Talese, with creating the "New Journalism" of the late 1960s. Thompson's highly subjective journalistic style, rich in hyperbole and opinion, and inevitably involving his own intrusion in the story, eventually came to be known as "Gonzo journalism. " While Thompson's profile seemed to wane in the 1980's and 1990's, he reemerged in recent years with the publication of his letters, his early novel "The Rum Diary," his new book "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk," and a regular column for ESPN.com skewering athletes, sports hucksters, and politicians alike. There is no question that Thompson's style has had an enormous influence on the internet journalists and opinion writers, including our own Jeff Koopersmith, Alan Bisbort, and Dave "Dr." Gonzo. I first became familiar with Thompson's writing at a pivotal moment in my life: the day I moved from Hartford to New York. I had decided to drop out of graduate school to purpue a career in the music business. On the bus ride down to New York — a trip which I shared with a couple of Trinity College undergrads who spent most of the trip making out and an old guy sprawled across two seats intermittently snoring — I read the harrowing, hysterical "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Most Thompson fans (and critics) zero in on famous pull quotes that center on the drug-fueled nature of the escapades of Thompson and his "attorney" Oscar Acosta as they hit Sin City in 1971 in search of the "American Dream," but the image that stuck with me was the moment they found it: Tape cassettes for the next sequence were impossible to transcribe due to some viscous liquid encrusted behind the heads. There is a certain consistency in a garbled sounds however, indicating that almost two hours later Dr. Duke and his attorney finally located what was left of the "Old Psychiatrist's Club" — a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot his full of tall weeds. The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had "burned down about three years ago." Thompson seemed always haunted by the specter of 1968 — the murder of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ascent of Nixon to the "imperial presidency." In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, he wrote an eerily prescient column predicting the "War on Terror," its sputtering failure, and an outright attack on free speech. His columns, books and articles ring true today more than ever, in an era when the greedheads, swine and rubes he so detested seem to have taken control of our nation — and the populace is suffering from a persistent and growing case of electoral buyers' remorse. Hunter S. Thompson will loom large among chroniclers of American history and politics. He was my generation's Mencken. Selah and thank you, Dr. Thompson.  In an interview, Dr. Thompson is asked how he'd like to be remembered: Remembered? Yeah, Leary shot his ashes in to space, what are you going to do? Maybe sprinkle them on Nixon's grave? Every once in awhile I come across a pretty good line. Let me read you the thing. Voice of my generation, a roadman for the lords of Karma, that’s my real job. Yeah. I’m a writer, and that’s what I want to be remembered as. I heard the music, and I wrote to it. Some people beat drums. Some people strum guitars. It’s all in the music you hear. Gothamist will remember him as a writer. A fiction writer, a fact reporter, a deadline deferrer, the inventor of Gonzo Journalism and as the many other things he was to those in his life.  Hunter S. Thompson, author of "The Curse of Lono," poses in Kona next to a billfish caught aboard the Humdinger. Advertiser library photo • 1983 Thompson's gonzo marathon coverage, friendship recalled By Rod Ohira The Honolulu Advertiser Hawai'i got the gonzo treatment in 1983 when Hunter S. Thompson published "The Curse of Lono," an account of his coverage of the 1980 Honolulu Marathon as a correspondent for Running magazine. The book also covered a trip he took to Kona. A review by Publisher's Weekly noted, "Barely is he off the plane when Thompson is regaled by stories of natives butchering tourists. ... Interspersed throughout the text are sidebars recounting the disastrous career of Capt. James Cook, who had been greeted as the god Lono upon his arrival in Hawaii. ... " Honolulu resident John Wilbur, a former pro football player and a friend of Thompson, said they met in 1969 and both worked on George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. "He was a gentleman, good and kind, but you never knew when he might go off," Wilbur said last night. "It could happen at any time." Wilbur said Thompson could swing from being vicious one moment to "remembering birthdays of friends" the next. "He came here in 1980 for the marathon. It really was a legendary day. My wife was running in the marathon. I remember driving to the starting line and Hunter is in between a cigarette and glass of Wild Turkey. My wife was in the back seat. He really lived his life his own way." Thompson returned in 2001 to cover the Honolulu Marathon again, this time as a correspondent for ESPN.com. In an interview with Advertiser reporter Stephen Tsai, Thompson recalled the 1980 marathon: "I was demoralized by the frenzy of the greasing up at the start — 10,000 people slapping grease on each other. I had never seen anything like that before. I was knocked off my mental stride. Nobody told me about the hugging and the greasing and screaming of those chants. I couldn't figure it out. Maybe I was hallucinating." Honolulu Marathon race director Jim Barahal recalled last night: "His lifestyle was different; what you read in his writing was not dissimilar to how he lived. You had to bring your A game if you were discussing something with Hunter. His mind was extremely sharp. "He liked to talk about writing. He once told me that self-doubt is the greatest obstacle to success." Thompson was accompanied here in 2001 by actor-director Sean Penn, who was interested in turning "Lono" into a movie. Thompson returned for the 2002 and 2003 Honolulu Marathons, Barahal said; his 2003 entourage included actor Josh Hartnett. Fear and loathing, but on his terms By Bruce Wilson The Daily Telegraph (Australia) It was during the early monsoon of 1974-75, so far as I can remember, that Hunter S. Thompson arrived in Saigon and briefly, but memorably, insinuated himself into the dying stages of the Vietnam War. Thompson would forgive me for being a little vague about the dates, what with one thing or another. Days meant nothing to him, although he was a better and more accurate reporter than you might think when he got down to it. He was there for Rolling Stone, he told me, because the newspaper had sent him to cover the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire in October 1974, when Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in one of the greatest of all heavyweight fights. Thompson had taken a large advance (he said ten grand plus expenses) but somehow got his mind lost on some kind of Zairean supergrass and had overlooked filing any copy, although, he said, he found the event very moving. As a result, Rolling Stone sent him to Vietnam on the basis he owed them ten grand (he said) and he had to stay there until they got that much copy out of him. He was popping, inhaling and drinking things at the time he told me this, but independent witnesses confirmed it. He had an unusual approach to the final flickers of US power in Indochina. He wore a long pair of patchwork beach shorts and a selection of T-shirts with anti-war messages on them, usually in fairly simple language, "FUCK WAR!" and the like, and sneakers without socks. Everywhere he went, he carried with him a 24-crate of 33 beer, known as bumeebah – 33 in Vietnamese – to all us foreigners. It was pretty bad beer, worse when warm, but Hunter seemed to like it all right. We once got arrested together for being in the wrong area of an air base and he refused to give up his beer. Things were turning paranoid on all sides and firearms were produced. Hunter loved firearms. "It's the goddamned beer or me," he said. It was one of those funny occasions in retrospect. He was a brave and inquisitive correspondent, but often totally confused and the stuff he finally wrote about Vietnam was not his best. I think it had gone too far by then for his kind of parody because Thompson was, essentially, a parodist. It was just a terrible mess America had got into, probably the biggest he had ever seen. One morning, Thompson was taking his usual dose of one thing or another and I suggested to him if, one day, he stopped using anything at all, his mind might lurch back from the weird tilt it found itself. "Think. It could be a whole new trip, Hunter. Looking at the world as it is, it really is," I said to him. For a moment he looked tempted. But, nah; to hell with that. Thompson wanted fear and loathing, but on his terms. He was the best writer on American politics in the 1970s I have read. On any level. It was only when I went to work in Washington, I realised just how good he was, using that best of tests with a writer – recognising something you have never seen before through his words. He was in a great tradition, too, of journalism by outrage and hyperbole. You could find a thousand examples in just the two Fear and Loathing books. I remembered, though, one piece immediately when I heard he was dead. The Washington Post, after hounding Richard Nixon from office, sent a reporter to California to write a frightful piece about the lonely figure of the ex-President wandering the beach at San Clemente, staring at the Pacific Ocean and wondering what might have been. Commenting on this, Thompson wrote if there was any justice in the world "the rancid corpse of Richard M. Nixon would be in the Pacific Ocean in the body of a hammerhead shark." It was, in a way, more an attack on the Post's puppy journalism than on Nixon. He was as hard on Democrats as he was on Republicans. Firearms ran through his life and mind. A common friend told me Hunter used to sit in his living room with a dozen TVs, occasionally shooting one. Then, I suppose inevitably, he shot himself. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- HST "So Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Probably no one who read any three words he ever strung together believed he'd die in bed at 95. Someone else will write the piece about how he changed journalism, revolutionized modern political coverage, etc. MeMo always worked for publications that paid her to write pretty straight, so his revolution happened someplace far away from where she was typing. But those of us who wished we could write like that composed a hundred extravagant, Thompson-like screeds in our heads and dreamed of the day -- a day that never came -- when someone would pay us to write wild, without boundaries, taking the road of excess to the palace of wisdom. Ahhh, we couldn't have, anyway. Or MeMo couldn't have, at least. Thompson was wild and rude and nuts and wrong but -- here's the deal -- often just so right. To write like Hunter S. By Ed Quillen The Denver Post Every time I sit down to write, I want to create the perfect opening paragraph - that is, one that so grabs the reader that he drops everything and thinks, "I've got to read the rest of this, right now." And in nearly 50 years of reading, I've encountered only two such openers. One began a short story, "An Imperfect Conflagration," written in the 1880s by Ambrose Bierce: "Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father - an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." The other, by Hunter S. Thompson, appeared in 1971: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive.' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas." In December 1913, Bierce rode a horse into Mexico, which was then suffering from a civil war. He had earlier written to a friend, "If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico - ah, that is euthanasia!" And then he vanished, although his last adventures inspired a fine novel, "Gringo Viejo" by Carols Fuentes, and a decent movie, "The Old Gringo," based on the novel. Thompson killed himself over the weekend. I have no idea why, and the one time I ever talked to him - he called me in the wee hours once to talk about the Lisl Auman case - I was rather tongue-tied and star-struck, for he might have been the most influential journalist of the late 20th century. Thompson's famous gonzo style didn't just hatch one morning. If you read the best collection of his work, "The Great Shark Hunt," which came out in 1979, you'll find a lot of great more-or-less traditional journalism, much of it written from South America for mainstream publications, as with this from 1963: "When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful." Then came his 1966 book "Hell's Angels." He didn't just interview people and quote police authorities; he got into the story, so deeply that he ended up getting stomped. A friend in college was highly impressed by the book and urged me to read it, so I did, and when we encountered that memorable 1971 opening Barstow paragraph in Rolling Stone magazine, we checked to see if it was the same Hunter Thompson who had written the Hell's Angels book. It was, and Thompson was at his prime then, writing not only what he saw but speculating about what might be happening, making himself a character who might be half-crazy, but that made him a lot saner than the full-bore lunatics who ran our country. Thompson had some good effects on American journalism. He loosened it up with a vicious style that captured the situation in just a few words. In the 1972 Democratic primaries, Hubert Humphrey "campaigned like a rat in heat," and Edward Muskie sounded "like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop." He had some bad effects on American journalists of my generation, many of whom seemed to think that creativity required trunkloads of uncontrollable substances, and that bragging about your consumption somehow improved your writing. I yearned to be able to write like Thompson or Bierce. Bierce fought the good fight against the railroad barons that dominated California politics. Thompson was more of an idealist than the cynical Bierce, as evidenced in 1973: "What a fantastic monument to the better instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon." The greedy little hustlers are still running this country, 32 years later. Good writing only goes so far, no matter how compelling the opening paragraph. "He was a crook." How Thompson said goodbye to Richard Nixon is as good a way to remember the high priest of gonzo as any. Gonzo gone Sonny Barger, Rosalynn Carter, Ben Fong-Torres and others remember the wild life and times of Hunter S. Thompson By Dana Cook Salon Ralph "Sonny" Barger, Hell's Angel. "All show and no go" Hunter S. Thompson wrote an article in the May 17, 1965, issue of The Nation about the Hell's Angels and called it "The Motorcycle Gangs, Losers and Outsiders." I actually liked the way it was written, even though some of the facts were exaggerated. After the article received a good reaction, Thompson came back to Oakland and hung around the club's favorite biker bar hangouts until he and I finally met face-to-face. He told me he wanted to ride with the club and me and write a book about us. Since I liked the way he wrote, the Oakland and Frisco chapters I let Hunter hang out with the club for a price, two kegs of beer. But as time went by, Hunter turned out to be a real weenie and a stone fucking coward. You read about he walks around his house now with pistols, shooting them out of his windows to impress writers who show up to interview him. He�s all show and no go. When he tried to act tough with us, no matter what happened, Hunter Thompson got scared. I ended up not liking him at all, a tall skinny, typical hillbilly from Kentucky. He was a total fake. Hunter got along with some of the members better than me. From "Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, by Ralph "Sonny" Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman (William Morrow, 2000) Charles Kuralt, broadcast journalist. "Bail" ...I knew him from Rio, where I had once lent him bail money to get out of jail after he had slugged a guy who had kicked a dog in a bar.... (1960s) From "A Life on the Road," by Charles Kuralt (G.P. Putnam's, 1990) Ben Fong-Torres, journalist. "Pills of unknown make and effect" ... to Palm Springs, where most of our top editors, along with a few people from advertising, and the magazine�s book division, were gathering at the summer home of millionaire Max Palevsky, who'd become an investor in Rolling Stone two years before... Hunter S. Thompson arrived on the second day, a Saturday. He showed up with his usual duffel bag of high-tech writing and rock and roll equipment. While the cooks and servants prepared dinner, he made the rounds, handing out pills of unknown make and effect. Thinking he'd already taken a couple, the dozen or so in our party played good sports and downed ours. By the time we made it to the dinner table, we were uniformly wasted. At one point, I held my knife and fork over my prime rib and asked for directions. Hunter, meantime, was sober for perhaps the first time in his adult life. He hadn't taken any of the pills. We abandoned dinner and staggered into the living room to watch some films...Whatever the film was, it was sensory overload for some of us, and we escaped to the pool. There, the last sight I remembered was Hunter, in Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, carrying a case of Roman candles in his left arm. With his right hand, he was trying to light a match, so that, in the darkness, he could read the directions on the box. (early 1970s) From "The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese American--From Number Two Son to Rock 'n' Roll," by Ben Fong-Torres (Hyperion, 1994) Sally Quinn, journalist. "Shit, I've already sold this story" Hunter Thompson was at the [CBS Morning News] studio when we arrived... Hunter Thompson is the "political correspondent" for Rolling Stone. He is a brilliant writer and what you might call a "new journalist." Hunter is legendary for his personal brand of journalism, where he made his name by getting "inside" Las Vegas, the Hell's Angels, and American politics. ...he wasn't supposed to be there at 1 a.m. He had brought a friend, to whom I was never formally introduced, and several six-packs "to last them through the night." Hunter was wearing his usual short-sleeved Hawaiian-print shirt, heavy-duty Keds, and his head was closely shaved, as usual. I have an image of Hunter flapping around, but I can't really remember much else about what he did except that at one point Hughes [co-host Rudd] gently reminded him that he was here as our guest and that we just assumed he understood he was not to write about this experience. "Shit," said Hunter, looking bewildered. "I've got to. I've already sold this story to a magazine for several thousand dollars." (New York, 1973) From "We're Going to Make You a Star," by Sally Quinn (Simon and Schuster, 1975) Jerry Jeff Walker, folk-country singer. "Gonzo-ism defined" ...in honor of old friend Hunter S. Thompson, I nicknamed the band the Lost Gonzos. I had become a fan of Hunter's writing, and Rosalee Sorrells once told me, "You need to visit my friend Hunter in Woody Creek, Colorado. He loves Wild Turkey, too." So I did, and we spent a couple of nights roaring our tits off around Aspen and wound up singing in his living room to his peacocks. I decided that what the band and I were doing musically, he was doing in his books. That night at his house we discussed Gonzo-ism: "Taking an unknown thing to an unknown place for a known purpose." (mid-1970s) From "Gypsy Songman," by Jerry Jeff Walker (Woodford Press, 1999) Rosalynn Carter, first lady (1976-1980). "Taken with Law Day speech" [At] Law Day ceremonies at the University of Georgia ...Jimmy...made some impromptu remarks about our system of justice as he saw it working in Georgia. He described several cases in which people had been cheated or sent to prison just because they were poor and lacked influence, and he criticized the legal establishment soundly for looking the other way while these things were occurring in front of them.... What we did not know at the time was that writer Hunter Thompson, who was visiting that day, was captivated by what Jimmy said. He had been sitting in the back of the audience, quietly sipping Wild Turkey bourbon disguised as iced tea. When Jimmy began speaking, Thompson began to ease toward the exit for a refill, but when he heard the names Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan he stayed to listen. He immediately asked the university to send him a taped copy of the speech, and for months afterward he played the tape over and over for anyone he could force to listen. Later, he came to Plains to visit us, and wrote a long article in Rolling Stone with the Law Day speech as the focal point. (Atlanta, 1974) From "First Lady From Plains," by Rosalynn Carter (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) Robert Sam Anson, journalist. "His special curse" ...past midnight, in a townhouse on New York's fashionable East Side, a rock magazine publisher [Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner] is hosting a party for his staff... The hour is late...he is doing his best to get drunk. Standing off in a corner, trademark shades in place, stoned as usual, he looks oddly depressed. This is not his kind of crowd. Everyone appears to be over thirty. They are wearing suits and ties. None of them is stoned. And they are all so calm. That is the real problem: none of them is crazy. They wouldn't understand the demons that live in his head. He drains his glass in a gulp and orders another drink. And then another. Buy the end of the evening, he will have had many drinks, and will still be sober. It is his special curse: to be able to fill his body with alcohol and drugs, and always have it function; never to be able to blot out what he has seen, what he knows. And looking around, he knows that it is over: the revolution, the fighting, the chance to be different. The counterculture has become The Culture, and out there in the streets is the proof.... (1976) From "Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation," by Robert Sam Anson (Doubleday, 1981) Peter Whitmer, author. "Off-duty split end" I have been hermetically sealed inside a motel room in the Florida Keys, waiting for Hunter Thompson for nearly two days.... The tornado has passed. The spark-fest and crunching sounds subside. The silence is deafening. The auxiliary generator begins thump, thumpa, thumping, and soon everything electric starts us again, except the television. The TV just sits there glowing... A few moments later, Hunter Thompson walks in. "What the fuck was that?" He snaps. He is tall and lean and tanned, wearing tennis shoes and an aloha shirt; he looks like an off-duty split end for the Miami Dolphins. He strides over to the television, slopping a little beer from his Heineken bottle, and stands starting at the phosphorescent set, as if its lobotomized blue eye could possibly help make order out of chaos. "Tornado," I say. "Yeah. Shit, the lights were out all the way down here. Let's get some dinner." He turns and heads out the door toward the restaurant, with all the arrogance of a guy who has just caught the winning touchdown pass against his former teammates. (early 1980s) From "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer with Bruce VanWyngarden (Macmillan, 1987) Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter. "Not an hallucination" I was in [agent] Guy McElwaine's outer office. Hunter Thompson arrived. Hunter Thompson? Here? In Guy MeElwaine's outer office? Wearing his Hawaiian shirt and shorts and safari hat and carrying his doctor's bag? Was I hallucinating? I hadn't seen him since I left Rolling Stone. "What the fuck are you doing here?" I said. "In the building," he mumbled, "heard you here. Wanna beer?" He took out a cold Heineken from his bag and handed it to me. "Fuck motherfuckers," he said. "Don't take any shit, vultures, jackal screenwriters, Sunset Marquis, call me," and Hunter was gone. (Hollywood, early 1980s) From "Hollywood Animal: A Memoir," by Joe Eszterhas (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)  Friends remark on Hunter Thompson's death By Robert Weller AP ASPEN, Colo. -- While Hunter S. Thompson's suicide shocked many in his out-of-the-way neighborhood, one of his closest friends said Monday the writer had been in a lot of pain after a broken leg and hip surgery. "I wasn't surprised," said George Stranahan, a former owner of the Woody Creek Tavern, one of Thompson's favorite hangouts. "I never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him." Thompson died in his home Sunday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Pitkin County Coroner Dr. J. Steve Ayers said Monday. Authorities refused to say whether a note was found. Thompson's body was found by his adult son, Juan, later Sunday evening. Investigators recovered the weapon, a .45-caliber handgun. Neighbors in Thompson's Woody Creek neighborhood said a broken leg had kept him from getting out as often as in the past, including to the tavern. But Shep Harris, who now owns the tavern, said Thompson would sometimes slip in for a drink and a smoke if no one else was there. Patrons normally are not allowed to light up because the tavern does not have a separate smoking area, but if Thompson were the only customer, he got a waiver. "We called it the Hunter Rule," Harris said. Mike Cleverly, a neighbor and longtime friend, spent Friday night watching a basketball game on TV with Thompson. He said Thompson was clearly hobbled by the broken leg. "Medically speaking, he's had a rotten year," he said. But he added that "he's the last person in the world I would have expected to kill himself. I would have been less surprised if he had shot me." Thompson was legendary for his love of firearms. "He had a thing about guns," said Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, an acquaintance and a former editor of the Aspen Times. "I was always very worried he was going to shoot someone." He did, at least once. In 2000, he accidentally slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property. Hayes said she was present when a drunken Thompson fired three shots into a copy of one of his books and gave it to a friend, saying, "This is your autographed copy." Despite the gunfire and the wild, drug-addled image he projected in his writing, Thompson was on good terms with the sheriff's department and was friends with Sheriff Bob Braudis and with DiSalvo, the sheriff's director of investigations. "I would definitely call him a friend," DiSalvo said. "This was not the way I expected Hunter to die." At the beginning and the end, Thompson was a sports writer By Phil Sheridan Philadelphia Inquirer In the end, which came Sunday in the most predictable way possible, even Hunter S. Thompson couldn't live up to his own legend. That's not meant as an insult to the legendary Dr. Gonzo, who took his own life with a gun. It's more of a reality check, something those of us prone to hero worship could use at times like this. There's no way to calculate how many people went into journalism because they were motivated by Thompson's brilliantly psychotic (or is that psychotically brilliant?) work in the 1970s. You just kind of know there's a bunch of us out there. It was a heady time. The mainstream media had Woodward and Bernstein, chipping away at the crimes of the Nixon White House. And then there was Thompson, who fired away at Nixon and a number of other targets, all the while writing his own legend in bursts of twisted, breathtaking prose. Most of us who saw the good Doctor as inspiration never came close to matching him. But then, how many people inspired by Bob Dylan to pick up a guitar came close to his level of artistry? How many half-baked Hemingways are out there? True originals are rare. That's the whole point. And Hunter Thompson was one of them. It is worth noting that, at the beginning and end of his career, Thompson was a sports writer. He wasn't much of one at the beginning, apparently, working for a paper while he was still in the Air Force. And he didn't have much impact at the end, either, writing a column for ESPN.com that was funny but hardly qualified as required reading. The voice was there, of course, but in a faint echo of the genre-defining voice from his glory days: "Super Bowl Sunday is almost upon us now, and I can feel the craziness happening around me like some kind of electric fever. We all understand that somebody is going to be fatally ZAPPED on Sunday, fried to a cinder and doomed forever into football's Hall of Shame. ... The Winners get rich and famous and the Losers are treated like scum. Or this: "The time has come, the suckfish said, to get rid of professional boxing in America. It has been a horrible, traveling hoax since Muhammad Ali's retirement, and now it has turned itself into a bag of Poison scum. In his last ESPN.com column, Thompson recounted a wee-hours phone call to actor Bill Murray, in which he proposes they invent a new sport that combines golf with skeet shooting. Like his best work, the reader is left to figure out what is true, what is exaggerated and what is wholly fabricated. But his best work was decades behind him. That may have something to do with Thompson's decision to take his own life at age 67. Maybe it was just inevitable, given his famous love of both guns and mind-altering substances. And then there is this possibility: Thompson has named Ernest Hemingway as one of his own idols. Hemingway also started in newspapers, also wrote about sports. Hemingway also created a persona that became bigger and more well-known than his actual work. Hemingway also got to his 60s, his best work behind him, before shooting himself. Just a thought. Between his early, long-forgotten sports writing and his recent Web column, Thompson wrote about America. He liked to talk about the dark side of the American dream, and his work often was angered or disgusted by political corruption or hypocritical enforcement of drug laws. But the anger and disgust were fueled by more than ether, bourbon and amphetamines. They were fueled by a belief in the American promise. For those of us who believed along with him, who found the trail he blazed grown over and abandoned, there is some consolation. Like most true originals, Thompson was a product of his time and place. There is no chance the celeb-obsessed Rolling Stone magazine of 2005 would have published the troubled and troubling work Thompson turned in back in the early '70s. Imagine his coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign being dissected by faceless gotcha-bloggers. It's hard to see how even Dr. Gonzo would have stood out in the media free-for-all wrought by cable TV, the Internet, and talk radio. Some of it is his own doing, of course. Thompson and his fellow "New" journalists were the ones who broke the old rules, weaving themselves into their stories and tossing the whole concept of objectivity aside. They inspired some great work. They also inspired some of the worst, including a whole generation of newspaper writers who can't get through 10 words without a first-person pronoun. I-aye-aye. In his prime, he wrote about the wretched excess of the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl, seeing metaphors for that warped American dream in each. At the end, he was writing about sports because he liked it more than he liked most anything else. So maybe there's a way back onto that trail after all. One wild night with Hunter S. Thompson By Dennis Duggan New York Newsday Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide Sunday night, swaggered through the literary world, posing as an outlaw journalist. But there was a playful side to him that few people ever got to see. I witnessed it in the late 1970s when William Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, invited me to join him and Thompson at Elaine's. The three of us shared a cab over to the celebrity hotspot, where we were joined by two of my female friends. We were greeted with great fanfare by Elaine. The glow of that greeting wore off quickly when the evening turned rowdy. Thompson, on seeing New York Times writer Tom Buckley enter the restaurant, began tossing dinner rolls. I sang a song about a young girl who sees a burglar in her home and pleads with him not to steal her "daddy's medals." One chorus goes, "they were found by his side / on the day that he died / and sent home to Mommy and me." My singing and the roll throwing enraged Elaine, and I and my female companions were escorted out by Elaine while Thompson was allowed to stay. I protested, saying it was Thompson who had started the ruckus and that I had joined in only to be friendly. "He's a celebrity," she said, ending the conversation. He was actually more than that. His bravura performances often overshadowed the seriousness with which he took writing. It would not seem in character for a Gonzo journalist to keep a file of his letters, but Thompson did because he had a sense that he was going to leave his mark on the literary world and wanted readers to know another side of him. Kennedy was the recipient of many of those letters. The first time Kennedy heard from Thompson was in an "arrogant" letter the Bad Boy of American letters wrote when Kennedy was managing editor of the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico. "That was in 1959," Kennedy said from his upstate New York home yesterday. "He wanted a job with the paper, and he wrote what a great writer he was and that he was working on a novel." Kennedy responded by sending Thompson an equally arrogant letter telling him to stick to his novel writing. Kennedy's letter arrived on the same day that Thompson received a rejection letter from Viking, which refused to publish his novel. "It wasn't a good day for Thompson," Kennedy said. That didn't stop Thompson from writing a follow-up letter to Kennedy in the summer of 1960 in which he threatened to "kick your teeth in and then jam a bronze plaque into your small intestines." The two kept writing each other, with both seeming to enjoy their vitriolic exchanges. Some of those letters are part of a collection published in 1997: "The Proud Highway, Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman," which was edited by historian Douglas Brinkley with a forward by Kennedy. In one letter, Kennedy wrote Thompson that there was no work in Puerto Rico for someone like him. "Too bad we couldn't get together. Lots of people go shoeless down here. You would have liked it," Kennedy wrote. In another jibe, Kennedy wrote: "If we ever get a candy machine and need someone to kick it in, we'll get in touch with you." "Thompson then wrote me that even though I had sold out to the Rotary, I sounded like a pretty decent guy," Kennedy said. "A year later, he came to Puerto Rico and walked into our city room." That visit, Kennedy said, was like the Humphrey Bogart-Claude Raines moment at the end of "Casablanca:" the start of a beautiful friendship. Kennedy said he got a call from Thompson two weeks ago, complaining about unspecified pains. Yesterday, Kennedy talked to Thompson's son, Juan. "He said that his father wanted a church funeral and he had asked that his ashes be shot out of a cannon," Kennedy said. Brinkley said the letters in "The Proud Highway" are "only a fraction of the 20,000 Thompson has composed since he was a young boy." Thompson wrote to people like Charles Kuralt of CBS News and Sonny Barger, head of the Hells Angels. He said he wrote to explain that, "I do not live from orgy to orgy." "Hunter Thompson was a great companion," Kennedy said. "He was very smart, and he had a wild and crazy way about him that was great fun. He was also very serious about literature, and he was a helluva writer."  The Proverbial 'Live Boy' By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." - Edwin W. Edwards In the same month the planet gets to know the 'journalist' James/Jeff Guckert/Gannon, Hunter S. Thompson decides to make The Big Bit-Spit and eject from the planet. This could be sacrilege, and I hope his family will forgive me, but there is something wretchedly fitting in the confluence. Hunter was a drunk and a drug-sucker. He would go to cover an event and slather himself with LSD. He went to the '72 GOP convention as a wild-eyed liberal and elbowed his way into the activist bullpen, grabbing a sign reading 'Garbage Men Demand Equal Pay' before charging the floor with the Nixon-shouters to howl “Four More Years!” at John Chancellor. He wanted to write about motorcycle gangs, so he went out and joined the worst of them, and got his ass stomped in. And wrote about it. Hunter Thompson is the reason I write politics. Period. He was the most honest man in the business. Everyone else had and has an angle, a reputation, or a source to protect. Hunter stripped it down to the raw throbbing nerve and let it fly. How is this for prose: "How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same." Or this: "It is a nervous thing to consider: Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics - completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around. If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants...or maybe 'wants' is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered 'political prisoners' and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four A.M." Or this: "The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place." That's the stuff. Rip it down, Bubba, and let the fur fly. For the record, the aforementioned is from 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972,' possibly the most purely excellent book on politics to be found anywhere. Amusing, then, that Hunter decides to cash his check in the same week we learn about James or Jeff Gannon or Guckert or whatever. What would Thompson have made of this feeble wretch? Of a man who reports on the White House with a fake name? Who was so clearly the go-to guy for McClellan or Bush when the questions got too hot? Who copied and pasted his 'news reports' from boilerplate GOP press releases? Who somehow got within 20 feet of the President of the United States using a false name while peddling his wares online as a male prostitute for $200 an hour? Hunter once wrote in 'The Great Shark Hunt' about walking in on two Secret Service agents sharing a joint back and forth in a hotel room. Maybe that's how Gannon/Guckert/Whoever got within pistol range of the leader of the free world. No other explanation seems to satisfy. It comes down to this. The Bush crew has been caught in bed with the proverbial 'live boy.' Someone in that White House either eased Gannon/Guckert/Whoever through the 'hard pass' application process, which requires a thorough background check, or else smoothed the way for him to get day pass after day pass after day pass. Some complain that Gannon/Guckert/Whoever is being victimized for his political views. This misses the point. Someone let a working, advertising whore into the White House, and then was stupid enough to let him walk around alive and free after he blew his own cover. That's the point. My hero died tonight. He was a flawed man, a maniac, in so many ways the antithesis of what a journalist is supposed to be. Worst of all, he told the truth. There is now one less warrior on this planet filled with Guckert clones, drones who get fed shit and regurgitate it wholesale for the masses because that is what we are trained to eat. Rest in peace, Hunter. Thank you for everything. We're going to deal with this Gannon/Guckert/Whoever person, and then move down the line and deal with the rest of the whores. You died on the eve of the birth of a new journalism, populist in nature, beholden to the truth and thanking the Google gods every step of the way. I wish you had stuck around to see it, but I'll tell you all about it when we meet at that clearing at the end of the path. Until then...  "See Hunter S. Thompson at his gonzo best on Late Night with Conan O’Brien; Late Night with David Letterman; The Charlie Rose Show; Prime Time Live; C-Span; George McGovern Tribute; The Crazy Never Die; Interviewing Keith Richards for ABC TV; and much, much more, thanks to this AMAZING 2-hour-plus DVD collection!" Previous post: Author Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself More articles about Hunter Thompson's suicide Hunter Stockton Thompson, 1937-2005 |
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