About Me
A Louisville, Kentucky native, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands and attended Louisville Male High School. His parents, Jack (d. 1952) and Virginia (d. 1999), married in 1935. Jack's death left three sons — Hunter, Davison, and James (d. 1994) — to be brought up by their mother. ============================================================
====Hunter was detained in 1956 for robbery. After crashing an employer's delivery truck, he joined the U.S. Air Force during the mandatory waiting period before army conscription. After working in the information services department at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida in 1956, he became the sports editor of the base's newspaper, The Command Courier. He also wrote for several local newspapers, which was against Air Force regulations. ========================================================He was honorably discharged in 1958 as an airman second class, having been recommended for an early discharge by his commanding officer. In summary, this airman, although talented will not be guided by policy, Col. W.S. Evans, chief of information services wrote to the Eglin personnel office. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. Thompson claimed in a mock press release he wrote about the end of his duty to have been issued a "totally unclassifiable" status. ===========================================================A
fter the Air Force he moved to New York City and on the GI Bill attended Columbia University's School of General Studies where he took classes on short story writing. ==========================================================Du
ring this time he worked briefly for Time Magazine as a copyboy for $51 a week. While working, he copied F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms using a typewriter, saying that he wanted to learn about the writing styles of the authors. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination. Later that year, he worked as a reporter for the Middletown Daily Record in New York. He was fired from this job after damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant who happened to be an advertiser with the paper.
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n 1960 Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico to take a job with the sporting magazine El Sportivo which soon folded. But the move to Puerto Rico allowed Thompson to travel in the Caribbean and South America writing freelance articles for several American daily newspapers. While in Puerto Rico he befriended journalist William Kennedy. After returning to the States, he lived and worked as a security guard and caretaker at Big Sur Hot Springs for an eight-month period in 1961, just before it became the Esalen Institute. While there, he was able to publish his first magazine feature in the nationally distributed Rogue magazine on the artisan and bohemian culture of Big Sur. The article would get him fired from his job as caretaker. ==========================================================Du
ring this time period, Thompson wrote two novels (Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary) and submitted many fictional short stories to publishers with little success. The Rum Diary was eventually published in 1998 long after Thompson had become famous. Kennedy later remarked that at the time he and Thompson were both failed novelists who had turned to journalism to make a living. ==========================================================Fr
om May 1962 to May 1963 Thompson returned to South America as a correspondent for a Dow Jones-owned weekly newspaper, the National Observer. When Thompson returned to the United States he promptly married his longtime girlfriend Sandra Dawn Conklin (aka Sandy Conklin Thompson, now Sondi Wright) and the two moved to Aspen, Colorado. Soon after, they moved into what Thompson described as his "fortified compound" in Woody Creek, Colorado, a small mountain hamlet outlying Aspen where he would reside for the rest of his life. ===========================================================T
hompson and Conklin were married on May 19, 1963 and they had one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, born March 23, 1964. The couple conceived five more times together. Three were miscarriages and two died shortly after birth. In a tribute issue for Hunter in Rolling Stone issue 970, Sandy wrote, " I ... want to acknowledge the five children Hunter and I lost — two full-term babies, three miscarriages.... I had so wanted more Hunters! One of the most beautiful gifts that Hunter ever gave me ... Sarah, our full-term, eight-pound baby, lived about twelve hours. I lay there in Aspen Valley Hospital waiting, and when I saw the doctor's face it was unbearable. I thought I might go mad. Hunter leaned over the bed and said, 'Sandy, if you want to go out there for a while — do that, just know that Juan and I really need you.' I was back." After nineteen years together and seventeen years of marriage, Hunter and Sandy divorced in 1980; the two remained close friends until Hunter's death. ============================================================
=Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects, including a story about Thompson's 1964 pilgrimage to Ketchum, Idaho in order to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway's suicide. Thompson and the editors at the Observer eventually had a falling out as Thompson moved temporarily to San Francisco, California, immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture of the time, while also writing for the Berkeley, California underground paper The Spider. ===========================================================I
n 1965, The Nation editor Carey McWilliams offered Thompson an opportunity to write a story based on his experience with the California-based Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After the The Nation published the article (May 17, 1965), Thompson received several book offers and spent the next year living and riding with the Hells Angels. The relationship broke down when the bikers suspected that Thompson would make money from his writing. The gang demanded a share of the profits and Thompson ended up with a savage beating, or 'stomping' as the Angels referred to it. Random House published the well-received hard cover Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966, described by the New York Times as "a world most of us would never dare encounter." ============================================================
In 1970 Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on the "Freak Power" ticket of promoting drugs decriminalization (but for use only, not trafficking, as he disapproved of profiteering), tearing up the streets and turning them into grassy pedestrian malls, banning any building so tall as to obscure the view of the mountains, and renaming Aspen, Colorado to "Fat City." The incumbent Republican sheriff whom he ran against had a crew cut, prompting Thompson to shave his head bald and refer to his opposition as "my long-haired opponent." ===========================================================W
ith polls actually showing him with a slight lead in the race, Thompson appeared at Rolling Stone magazine headquarters in San Francisco with a six-pack of beer in hand and declared to editor Jann Wenner that he was about to be elected the next sheriff of Aspen, Colorado and wished to write about it. Thus, Thompson's first article in Rolling Stone was published as The Battle of Aspen with the byline "By: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Candidate for Sheriff)." Despite the publicity, Thompson ended up narrowly losing the election. ===========================================================T
he majority of Thompson's most popular and acclaimed work was to appear within the pages of Rolling Stone. Thompson went on to work as a political correspondent for the magazine, retaining the title of chief of the "National Affairs Desk" on the magazine's masthead for over thirty years until his death. Two of his books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, were first serialized there. Along with Joe Eszterhas and David Felton, Thompson would be instrumental in expanding the focus of the magazine past music criticism; indeed, Thompson was the only staff writer of the epoch never to contribute a music feature to the magazine. Nevertheless, his articles were always peppered with a wide array of pop music references ranging from Howlin' Wolf to Lou Reed. Armed with early fax machines wherever he went, he became notorious for haphazardly sending sometimes illegible material to the magazine's San Francisco offices immediately as they were to go to press. ===========================================================A
lso 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 Thompson's sheer desperation; he 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. ==========================================================Th
e 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 the 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." ==========================================================Th
ompson's next piece for Rolling Stone was an expose on the controversial death of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles Police Department. Finding it difficult to talk in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angles, Thompson and Chicano activist/attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta decided to travel to Las Vegas, Nevada and take advantage of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word photograph caption for the Mint 400 motorcycle race held there. ===========================================================T
he result of the trip to Las Vegas became the 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, first appearing in Rolling Stone as a two-part series. ==========================================================Th
e book is a first-person account by a journalist named "Raoul Duke" on a trip to Las Vegas with "Dr. Gonzo," his "300-pound Samoan attorney," to cover a narcotics officers' convention and the "fabulous Mint 400". During the trip, Duke 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. ===========================================================C
oming to terms with the failure of the 1960s countercultural movement is a major theme of the novel, and the book was greeted with considerable critical acclaim, including being heralded as "by far the best book yet written on the decade of dope" by the New York Times and a "scorching epochal sensation" by author Tom Wolfe. "The Vegas Book", as Thompson referred to it, was a mainstream success and the first widely-read work of Thompson's that employed his gonzo journalism techniques, and the novel introduced his style to the masses. ==========================================================Th
ompson first submitted to Sports Illustrated 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. ===========================================================T
hompson's first published use of the word gonzo appears in book's passage: "Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism." ===========================================================W
ithin the next year, Thompson wrote extensively for Rolling Stone while covering the election campaigns of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George McGovern. The articles were soon combined and published as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. As the title suggests, Thompson spent nearly all of his time traveling the "campaign trail" and his coverage 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. ===========================================================T
hompson 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." ===========================================================T
hompson was to provide Rolling Stone similar coverage for the 1976 Presidential Campaign that would appear in a book published by the magazine. Reportedly, as Thompson was waiting for a $75,000 advance check to arrive, he learned that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner had pulled the plug on the endeavor without telling Thompson. ===========================================================W
enner then asked Thompson to travel to Vietnam to report on what appeared to be the closing of the Vietnam War. Thompson accepted, and left for Saigon immediately. He arrived with the country in chaos, just as the United States was preparing to evacuate and other journalists were scrambling to find transportation out of the region. While there, Thompson learned that Wenner had pulled the plug on this excursion as well, and Thompson found himself in Vietnam without health insurance or additional financial support. Thompson's story about the fall of Saigon would not be published in Rolling Stone until ten years later. ===========================================================T
hese two incidents severely strained the relationship between the author and the magazine, and Thompson would contribute far less to the publication in future years. ===========================================================
1980 marked both his divorce from Sandra Conklin and the release of Where The Buffalo Roam, a loose film adaptation of situations from Thompson's early 1970s work, with Bill Murray starring as the author. After the lukewarm reception of the film, Thompson temporarily relocated to Hawaii to work on a novel. The Curse of Lono was a gonzo-style account of a marathon in the state that was extensively illustrated by Ralph Steadman, first appearing in Running magazine in 1981 as "The Charge of the Weird Brigade" and before being excerpted in Playboy in 1983. ==========================================================
In 1983, he covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada but would not discuss these experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear twenty years later. Later that year he authored a piece for Rolling Stone called "A Dog Took My Place", an expose of the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce and what he termed the "Palm Beach lifestyle". The article contained dubious insinuations of bestiality (among other things) but was considered to be a return to proper form by many. ============================================================
Shortly thereafter, Thompson accepted an advance to write about "couples pornography" for Playboy. As part of his research, he spent time at the O'Farrell Theater in San Francisco,; prominent newspaper columnist Herb Caen erroneously reported that the Gonzo One had become the O'Farrell's night manager. Eventually evolving into a full length nonfiction novel tentatively titled The Night Manager, the project never materialized. At the behest of old friend and editor Warren Hinkle, he became a media critic for the San Francisco Examiner until the end of the decade. ===========================================================T
hompson continued to contribute irregularly to Rolling Stone. "Fear and Loathing in Elko", published in 1992, was a well received fictional rallying cry against Clarence Thomas, while "Mr. Bill's Neighborhood" was a largely non-fictional account of an interview with Bill Clinton in an Arkansas diner. Rather than embarking on the campaign trail as he had done in previous presidential elections, Thompson monitored the proceedings from cable television; Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, his account of the 1992 campaign, is composed of reactionary faxes sent to Rolling Stone. A decade later, he contributed "Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004"--an account of a road jaunt with John Kerry during his presidential campaign that would be Thompson's final magazine feature. ===========================================================D
espite publishing a novel and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the majority of Thompson's literary output after the late 1970s took the form of a 4-volume series of books called The Gonzo Papers. Beginning with The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 and ending with Better than Sex in 1994, the series is largely a collection of rare newspaper and magazine pieces from the pre-gonzo period, along with almost all of his Rolling Stone short pieces, excerpts from the Fear and Loathing... books, and etc. ===========================================================B
y the late 1970s Thompson received complaints from critics, fans and friends alike that he was regurgitating his past glories without much in the way of new innovation on his part; these concerns are alluded to in the introduction of The Great Shark Hunt, where Thompson eerily suggested that his "old self" commit suicide. ===========================================================P
erhaps in response to this, as well as the strained relationship with Rolling Stone, and the failure of his marriage, Thompson became more reclusive after 1980, often retreating to his compound in Woody Creek and rejecting and/or refusing to complete assignments. Despite the dearth of new material, Wenner kept Thompson on the Rolling Stone masthead as chief of the "National Affairs Desk," a position he would hold until his death. ==========================================================Ho
wever, Thompson's work was popularized again with the 1998 release of the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which opened to considerable fanfare. The novel was reprinted to coincide with the film, and Thompson's work was introduced to a new generation of fans. ==========================================================So
on thereafter, Thompson's "long lost" novel The Rum Diary was published, as were the first two volumes of his collected letters, which were greeted with critical acclaim. =======================================================Thomp
son's next and penultimate collection, Kingdom of Fear, was a combination of new material, selected newspaper clippings, and some older works. Released in 2003, it was perceived by critics to be an angry, vitrolic commentary on the passing of the American Century. In addition, Thompson penned a sports column for ESPN "Page 2" during the early 2000s, which was later compiled into the book Hey Rube : Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk (2005). ==========================================================Hu
nter married Anita Bejmuk, his long-time assistant, on April 24, 2003. ===========================================================T
hompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 67 years old. ===========================================================T
hompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson) and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot, though the gunshot was mistaken for a book falling, and so they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him: "Winkel Thompson continued playing 20 questions with Will, Juan Thompson continued taking a photo." Thompson was sitting at his typewriter with the word "counselor" written in the center of the page. ==========================================================Th
ey reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at the gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with Thompson when he ended his life. =========================================================A suicide note delivered to his wife 4 days before his death was published by Rolling Stone Magazine. Entitled "Football Season Is Over", it read:"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" =========================================================Art
ist and friend Ralph Steadman wrote:"...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell — rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and Peacocks..." ==========================================================On
August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, known to be the song most respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable permanent location can be found. There is talk of a public party sometime in the summer of 2006. According to widow Anita Thompson, the actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson (and who portrayed Raoul Duke in the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), financed the funeral. Depp told the Associated Press, "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." Other famous attendees at the funeral included: U.S. Senator John Kerry and former U.S. Senator George McGovern; 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley; actors Bill Murray (who portrayed Hunter S. Thompson in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam), Sean Penn and Josh Hartnett; singers Lyle Lovett and John Oates; and numerous other friends. An estimated 280 people attended the funeral. ===========================================================T
he plans for this impressive monument were initially drawn by Thompson and Ralph Steadman and were shown as part of an Omnibus program on the BBC entitled Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision (1978). It is included as a special feature on the second disc of the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD release of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The video footage of Steadman and Thompson drawing the plans and outdoor footage showing where he wanted the cannon constructed were played prior to the unveiling of his cannon at the funeral. ==========================================================Do
uglas Brinkley, a friend and now the family's spokesman, said of the ceremony: "If that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off." ===========================================================
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