About Me
Birth of Gonzo...
in 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved for an obscure sports magazine called Scanlan's Monthly. Although it was not widely read at the time, the article is the first of Thompson's to use techniques of gonzo journalism, a style he would later employ in almost every literary endeavor. The manic, first person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of sheer desperation by the way of Thompson, who was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook. Ralph Steadman, who would later collaborate with Thompson on several projects, contributed expressionist pen and ink illustrations.The first use of the word Gonzo to describe Thompson's work is credited to the journalist Bill Cardoso. Cardoso had first met Thompson on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968 New Hampshire Primary. In 1970, by which time Cardoso had become to editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, he wrote Thompson praising the "Kentucky Derby" piece in Scanlan's Monthly as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Thompson took to the word right away, and according to illustrator Ralph Steadman said "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo."Thompson's first published use of the word appears in 1971's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, where he wrote the passage: "Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first appeared in Rolling Stone as two-part series. The book is a first-person account by a journalist (Thompson himself, under the pseudonym "Raoul Duke") on a trip to Las Vegas with his "300-pound Samoan" attorney, "Dr. Gonzo" (a character inspired by Thompson's friend, Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta) to cover a narcotics officers' convention and the "fabulous Mint 400" motorcycle race. During the trip, he and his lawyer, always referred to as "my attorney" become sidetracked by a search for the American dream, with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol, LSD, ether, adrenochrome, mescaline, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs.The book came about as the result of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word caption to accompany a photograph of the Mint 400 motorcycle race. He submitted a manuscript of 2,500 words, which was, as he later wrote "aggressively rejected." Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner was said to have liked "the first 20 or jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication -- which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it," Thompson later wrote.The novel was both a mainstream success and greeted with considerable acclaim, including being heralded as the "best book on the dope decade" by the New York Times and a "scorching epochal sensation" by author Tom Wolfe. Fear and Loathing was the first widely-read work of Thompson's that employed his gonzo journalism techniques, and the novel introduced Thompson's style to the masses.Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is a collection of Rolling Stone articles he wrote while covering the election campaigns of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George McGovern. The book focuses largely on the Democratic Party's primaries (Nixon, as an incumbent, performed little campaign work) and its breakdown due to splits between the different candidates; McGovern was extolled throughout while fellow candidates Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey were ridiculed. As an early supporter of McGovern, it could be argued that his unflattering coverage of the rival campaigns along with the rapidly expanding circulation of Rolling Stone played a role in the senator's nomination.Thompson would go on to become a fierce critic of Nixon, both during and after his presidency. After Nixon's death in 1994, Thompson famously described him in Rolling Stone as a man who "could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time" and said "his casket [should] 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. [He] was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it."..div style=font-size:9px;position:absolute;left:-
