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Writers Remember Hunter S. Thompson, 1937—2005

originally published March 2, 2005


Never Weird Enough

"To live outside the law, you must be honest." - Bob Dylan

Jason Crosby

From the cover of the May 7, 2003 Flagpole.

The current President of the United States is a disastrously unqualified coke-snorting frat boy, a man whose finger rests on the nuclear button but who cannot pronounce "nuclear button." The Vice-President is a shady war profiteer with a diseased heart. We just traded up from an Attorney General who gets law-enforcement tips straight from God, anointed himself with oil on his first day on the job, and covered up the bare breast of the statue of Justice outside his office to an AG who approves of Pinochet-style "disappearances" and the use of torture.

Geeks and mutants, all of them: the stuff of nightmares, particularly of Hunter S. Thompson's nightmares. The man who made his name throwing journalistic stinkbombs at the Nixon Administration conceded in a recent interview that those thugs were pikers compared to the current band of thieves. And now he's gone, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, when we really need him. He was our attack dog, a savage warrior for savage times. Imbued with the backhanded blessing of skewed sight, he looked into the heart of the American Dream and saw the black and putrid ichor pumping gallon after gallon of Bad Craziness. His response was a lifetime of crazed, vicious and ultimately true dispatches, field reports from the edge of madness. Dante Alighieri with a .44 Magnum, wired to the gills on poppers, reds and Wild Turkey.

Since the story of Thompson's suicide broke, media outlets and cyberspace have been flooded with tributes and reminiscences of the good Doctor, so I doubt I'm saying anything original here. But there are some things that cannot be repeated enough, and among those are the debt that we who keep our eyes open and make the naked truth our stock-in-trade owe to Hunter Thompson.

That's truth, not facts. Thompson played fast and loose with facts, aware of their elastic nature and not ashamed to sacrifice them in the service of the Bigger Picture.

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here - not under any byline of mine; or anything else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."

- Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72

Thompson is frequently lumped together with his contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese as the founders of something called "The New Journalism," a style of reportage that blends fact and fudging and injects the personal reflections of the journalist-as-participant into the proceedings. But it's a distinction that rankled Thompson, and rightly so. Thompson's patented brand of journalism was less "new" than a howl of defiance against the old-boy system of reporters cozied up with politicians, pimping out their objectivity in exchange for juicy quotes from "unnamed sources."

He was proud to be denied White House press credentials. He had no respect for deadlines. His clashes with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner were legendary, as Wenner would send Thompson out on assignment only to find Thompson had blown through his expense account, compiled incoherent odds and ends of scribbled notes and tape-recorded ramblings, and ignored the very thing he had been sent to cover in the first place. And yet the end results were always as brilliant as they were far afield, and if the Stone in its heyday had built its following on rock stars, it owed its reputation as the voice of the counterculture to Raoul Duke at the National Affairs Desk.

"There is nothing in this world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There is a tendency among Thompson's readers to celebrate the man for his hedonism, for the copious amounts of drugs he ingested and his brazen admission to dangerous pharmaceutical excess. Those people usually miss the point. The drugs - and how much of them he really did on assignment will always remain in doubt - were a means to an end. Thompson was no Deadhead, consuming various forms of attitude adjustment for their own sake. The vision swimming before Thompson's eyes was America as a twisted hellscape roiling beneath the thin veneer of middle-class values. Long before David Lynch planted the severed ear on the lawn or the Wachowski brothers offered up the pill that makes you see the body banks and killer robots, Thompson was shouting out about the perversity beneath wholesome institutions like the Kentucky Derby and the National Sheriffs' Association. He could see past the bland facades of civic organizations and politicians and bring to light the undercurrents of hatred and vengeance driving so many of those who seek to wield power.

His reaction was Fear and Loathing. His solution was to gird his loins to fight the good fight by amping up on whatever substances would make him mean and twitchy and combative. The drugs kept his eyes wide open and the froth in his mouth and supplied the Gonzo mojo that made his writing alive and vital. He was a cynic, but like all cynics he was at heart a romantic, a man who watched the death of a better America as the bodies of Jack and Bobby and Martin hit the ground and who grieved for the loss. Instead of wringing his hands like the rest, however, Thompson pointed his finger straight at the people who allowed it to happen and devoted his life to being the batshit pain in the ass they could not kill, silence or ignore.

Forget the drugs. Forget the guns. Forget Garry Trudeau and how "Uncle Duke" wore away at the dangerous edges of the Thompson persona. Hunter Thompson was first and last a great writer, a seminal source for anyone looking to get at the heart of the American experience. He was a Journalist, with a capital J, a lodestone guiding the independent spirit of publications like the one you're reading right now.

Why Thompson chose to check himself out is a mystery as of this writing. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing he'd do. But there has to be a reason, and a damn good one, because the geeks and mutants are in power, and that's exactly Hunter's kind of fight.

John G. Nettles

Mercy On You Swine

"In every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings - whichever fits."

- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson made us feel that we were in on the joke. There was always, though, a sensation that his indictment included us. Maybe he was thinking of his reader when, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he wrote of the hitchhiker:

I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile… admiring the shape of his skull.

"By the way," I said. "There's one thing you should probably understand."

He stared at me, not blinking. Was he gritting his teeth?

"Can you hear me?" I yelled.

He nodded.

"That's good," I said. "Because I want you to know that we're on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream." I smiled. "That's why we rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?"

He nodded again, but his eyes were nervous.

"I want you to have all the background," I said. "Because this is a very ominous assignment - with overtones of extreme personal danger… Hell, I forgot all about this beer; you want one?"

He shook his head.

"How about some ether?" I said.

Sure. Why not. It was cool to be included; we were participants, road-buddies. I came to feel, though, that Thompson was laughing at us, not with us, and laughing all the way to the bank.

The name of Thompson's last book? Hey Rube.

Thompson was keenly aware of his status as an icon. His niche in the lecture circuit depended on it.

He was also aware that there is no line of apostolic succession for American icons, nor are we hard-wired to accept their graceful aging. We want an absolutely unique, white-hot moment of discovery, and we want it, paradoxically, over and over. Maybe John Hartford said it best: "Be careful what you get famous for. You'll have to do it a long, long time."

This puts something of a strain on those whose public performances have a life span longer than their allotted moment. However long he lived, Elvis always would have had to do "Are You Lonely Tonight," and Kurt Cobain, had he not engaged in a preemptive strike, would be facing 40 years of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas defined Hunter S. Thompson. It's why I read what I read of his subsequent books, and I returned to it often. I read the novel - no way I'll consider it non-fiction - and it changed me. I was in college; my friends had read it, so I did, too. Having as little imagination as they, I sucked it down as gospel, and its language, tone and attitudes became standard parts of our lives. We sought out his earlier book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966), and when in the wake of Richard Nixon's re-election, Thompson published Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, '72, our political vocabularies also were honed by Thompson's estimations of the politicos of our day. "There is no way," he wrote, "to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."

What we loved was the energy, the outrage, the limits pushed 'til they pushed back, and the lack of consequence for the whole negotiation. What we didn't know, couldn't have known because we were young and stupid, was that Thompson's style and persona were products, carefully manufactured by an astute writer who'd worked hard to learn his craft. He'd begun writing in the Air Force, becoming a sports editor of the Command Courier, the base's newspaper, when his predecessor was busted for public urination… or that's what Thompson told the BBC in a January, 2000 interview. He left the Air Force in '57 and began a peripatetic career in journalism, working for a long string of small papers. He wrote a novel in 1959, The Rum Diaries, which wasn't published until 1998. He was so serious about the craft of writing that he retyped Ernest Hemingway novels to better understand Hemingway's style and how his novels were put together.

Hard to believe? Try this, then. Open Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to any page and try to find a badly written passage. In a novel about wasted talent, there is no talent wasted. The writing is lean, economical, poignant, frightening and, on occasion, still very, very funny.

Much has been made of Thompson's becoming a commodity, of his excesses and his documentation of those excesses in the name of his product, "gonzo journalism:" his repetition, his self-imitation. Maybe it's true, and if it is, I blame us. As I said, we don't like our celebrities to live past their moment.

Maybe our moment is more accurate.

I want to feel that I discovered Hunter S. Thompson. I want to be the arbiter of when he sold out. I want my connection to him inviolate because he's a component of, a validation of my way of looking at the world. I want to feel smug satisfaction when I see someone 30 years younger than I am reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

That someone wasn't there and doesn't know what I know. That someone didn't live through the times about which Thompson wrote. Looking at that someone, I can even hear Thompson's benediction on all such…

"God's mercy on you swine."

Yeah, I can tell myself, but he ain't talking to me.

Samuel Prestridge with Sarah Prestridge.

Gidget Goes Gonzo

As my fo' up in Denver would have it, there is little mystery to the sudden departure of Hunter S. Thompson: "… he was a delusional, manic depressive addict who was approaching 70. Other than that, can't think of a single reason…" Call it pragmatism or brute honesty, but it's the sort of stark clarity that comes to those who reside a certain distance above sea level. It's not for everyone. I have been there Chauncey, and met with the creeping nausea that lives within the waning atmosphere. They may not be as close to the truth as they might think, but it appears to them that way - crisp, unflagging and bristly free of speculation.

Hunter's own roost outside of Aspen hovered somewhere near 8000 ft., but all those years of chaste oxygen and free-form narcology somehow didn't amount to a fierce sense of the retirement he'd earned. He could not walk softly towards the sunset like our Sandra Dee. Or at least that's what the fobs at the MPAA would have you believe during this year's Oscar flashback sequence. In reality, Ms. Gidget faced demons both numerous and potent (anorexia, alcoholism, cancer and depression) long before her kidney failure eventually ran her to ground. But once you realize that she was born with the real and unenviable surname of Zuck in a hamlet as un-surfable as Bayonne, NJ, how could she not? People who leave the starting gate with that sort of handicap can't evade serious trouble for long. We'll have to wait a while, of course, until some joker comes up with how gonzo it really got for her. But eventually it will all come out and shards of the story will be gleefully sold off to Vanity Fair.

On the flip side, Thompson's loud and kaleidoscopic prose largely put it all out there from the beginning. Drugs, pornography and a serial taste for young assistants were just a few of the foundation elements that he curried into a fairly privileged place in the panoply of literature. It only seemed like a "condition" (or depravity) to the suburban moms holding down their end of straight culture. The Modern Library can attest to that.

Jason Crosby

Hunter placed two notches in that canon (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Hell's Angels), although they are only high profile examples of his artistry. It's his second volume of collected letters (Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist) that offers much of the back story. His correspondence often became the proving grounds - the place where students of his work will get to see him cut the original dies. After that. his published work trended, like his friend Dylan, toward more epochal shifts and the resulting "abstract realities." It was there that they both evolved from hipster icon to myth. Those are the bits that Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp cared about. And for that reason their filmed version of Hunter's "Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (as the Las Vegas epic was subtitled) turned into the travesty that it was. For a better chance at the truisms, serious users are to be directed to Breakfast With Hunter, a locally brewed Aspen filmmaker's look inside the writer's true aesthetic. Whether he was playing to the camera or not, watching the author evict Gilliam's predecessor (director Alex Cox) from his salon, is somehow a far better illustration of the blur the author wrought between fiction and reality.

In the end, the going had probably not gotten as weird as we might think. A deal did not go sour (as it did in the case of his infamous associate and Chicano legal icon Oscar Acosta). A cocktail had not been mis-infused. Thompson had written recently about the joys of grandparenting, and his place among the literati and the Left were unassailable. From what leaked out of his semi-regular writing gig for ESPN, the grim vibrations of the "Kingdom of Fear" he claimed we were living in hadn't seemed to rattle him at all. But visitors to the Dr. during his final days saw the evidence of the real beast that gnawed at his flesh — the one that left him stooped from his recent hip and back surgeries. Pain exercised it's global rights upon his person until he could take it no more.

My sage-like friend from Oxford, Mississippi put in plainly when he said that it takes "only one moment of desperation" to shatter what Hunter himself referred to as Hemingway's "illusion of peace and contentment." Papa imagined that by getting back to Ketchum he could silence the hurt that railed within him. But ultimately there was only one way to put those voices down. Same for Spalding Gray. Same for Hunter. RIP, Maestro.

JoE Silva

Howl, Dammit!

Scientists studying such things have recently found evidence that humans, as we recognize them, have been on the planet for much longer than we had originally figured. It may be 30,000 years or it may be 60,000 years; either way, we've been here a while and, amazingly enough, we're still here. Through wars, plagues, societal upheavals, political disputes and bad television, humanity continues to insist on existing. Actually, frankly, when you get right down to it, we're only a tee-niny twig on the vast shrub of life. The world still belongs to the microscopic organisms that first appeared all those billions of years ago. Life rolls on.

Hunter Thompson is dead. Life rolls on. It probably goes without saying that Thompson had a major impact on my own views as a writer and sometime journalist.

Them that know would probably be correct in saying that Thompson had a not-insignificant impact on how I live my life, as well. I could waste space going into great detail about that, about how Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas changed the way I look at both writing and reporting. I could gush about his skill as a wordsmith and literary personality, so much so that every writer that's considered "non-mainstream" should've been sending the dude Father's Day cards for the past three decades. I could relate charming anecdotes about how, in my wild-boy days, I tried to emulate the good doctor's, shall we say, lust for life, and how amazed I am that I came out of it relatively unscathed.

But I won't waste my time or yours doing that. I also won't spend too much time mourning or asking why he did what he did. As for the latter, it was his choice to check out when he did, for whatever reason, and only those that have faced that particular terror on a dark and lonely night have any right to pass judgment.

Even then, I won't. As for mourning, well… I've still got his books. The books will always be with us and, just like old photographs give never-ending life to the memories of loved ones long gone, so will Hunter, in a way.

Ironically, I finished re-reading Fear and Loathing for the umpteenth time just a day before I got the news. Life has a sense of humor that way, I suppose.

Instead, I ask his fans to do a poor country boy one small favor. Remember. Remember what HST stood for. Remember what he said. Remember who he was angry at and why he was angry with them. Remember what he fought for and railed against. The drugs, the guns, the violence, the insanity, the movies… they're all merely details.

Friends and neighbors, the world of political punditry and societal criticism is in sad, sorry shape these days. Everyone has an Agenda, whether they recognize it or not. The vast majority is concerned with little more apart from preaching to the choir, not really caring if anyone's actually listening as long as they're agreeing or at least reacting. Being "fair" in the media means allowing every dingbat idea to cross the public radar, as long as it doesn't threaten the interests of the status quo.

We've also recently discovered there's quite a few people employed by the U.S. government and current administration to advocate policies despite those same people referring to themselves on a regular basis as "journalists." Journalists aren't paid shills of the government; journalists exist to keep the government honest, and that can't be done if a "journalist" is taking money from the government. And apparently, it's all fine and dandy legally, as long as said "journalist" tells people he or she is doing it. For some reason, that makes my brain steam up.

Hunter Thompson didn't do that. He didn't shill for a politician or even a political ideology. Richard Nixon or, for that matter, George W. Bush aside, Thompson loathed Hubert Humphrey and was Ed Muskie's worst nightmare. He sought The Truth… as he saw it, admittedly. Human beings are subjective creatures, and pure, unadulterated objectivity is impossible.

Thompson knew this, knew the rule was "be objective" and said "to hell with that." When something offended his sense of The Truth, he went after it like a rabid dog. When politicians dared to peddle their bullshit in front of him, the Doctor went for the jugular.

That's what a journalist or pundit or critic should do. Instead, far too many just say what they're paid to say, whether they're aware of the arrangement or not. Thompson knew politics was a game, but he played it by his rules and his rules alone.

Mourn the passing of Hunter S. Thompson, beloved, but honor him, as well. The next time some cheapjack politician spouts off nonsense or some jellyfish of a "journalist" fouls the waters of truth, don't just sit there and take it like a "good American." Howl, long and hard. If for no other reason, howl in the memory of a man who can no longer howl for us. We owe it to Hunter S. Thompson, and to do less would be shameful. Howl.

Matt Thompson

A Different View

Hunter has made me sad for some time, and for some reason I just can't warm to that style of writing since I moved out of adolescence, although my politics-junky girlfriend did love the Nixon book, which she wasn't expecting. Anyway, it's been clear for a while now that instead of living by his wits, he was being just as self-destructive as before but being propped up by his handlers, one of whom, his assistant, he eventually married. He was very smart, and very talented, and it's very sad that he was so batshit insane and unable or unwilling to get treatment for it. It's sad that he continued to represent this particular dumbass lifestyle and his public face was one that attempted to legitimize drawing it out into middle and old age, but the reality was that he was only able to do it because he was independently wealthy and had successfully surrounded himself with yes-(wo)men. Between the accounts of his drunken, embarrassing book signing fiasco last year and the accounts of writers who spent time with him working on stories, this was just not a human being I could like or respect, and shame, shame, shame on the people around him for not doing something about this. I keep seeing accounts presenting his fate as inevitable, but it simply wasn't.

I'm not articulating this very well, but maybe you get the point. This was preventable, and he could have matured into a great writer instead of simply becoming a self-parody whose main message, at least as the public received it, was the democratization of self-destruction, whereas, like most democratizations, it was really only within your grasp if you already had m-o-n-e-y.

Michael Barthel

Burying The Gonzo

Round and round we go… Welcome to the Kingdom of Fear… The Fog… Brown Buffalo recap… Over the Edge… Trampled by Beasts… The Good Doctor bows out… A brief conversation between Earth and Hell… Lessons in Fear and Loathing… The Shining Path… Over and out…

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "… buy the ticket, take the ride." And it's true 99 percent of the time. But, far as I know, nobody ever signed themselves up for this twisted carousel world. And here we are anyway.

Iraq, The Bush doctrine, steroids in Major League baseball, scattered Soviet-era nuclear weapons, shit-sucking terrorist whores, genocide in Rwanda, the Patriot Act, trillion-dollar debts, 3 Doors Down at the top of the charts. In Thompson's heyday, it was Vietnam, that rat-bastard Nixon, Mohammed Ali beaten by a human hamburger named Joe Frazier, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, and most of all the spine-cracking pain of the high water mark - the once-beautiful Zenith of the now bloody, beaten and lifeless carcass of the '60s Dream.

What's really surprising, when you think about it, is that someone so attuned to the demented dread that permeates society, that someone so aware, so clued-in to how bad things had become, could've lasted so long. Maybe that's what the drugs were for after a while. "Dear God, bring on the fog so I can get through another day clinging to half a shred of blissful ignorance!" But we'll never know what brought on this particular shitstorm. Not unless there's a note lying next to all that blood and guts out on Owl Farm in Aspen.

I always thought Thompson would go out in a blast of defiant weirdness, like that fat Samoan attorney of his, Dr. Gonzo (AKA Oscar Acosta), who went off on some lunatic escapade with a drug- and-weapons-dealing cartel and was never heard from again.

I thought Thompson would've met his end in a motorcycle wreck on some winding snow-covered mountain road, where after pushing the edge for miles, he saw the light on the other side of the chasm and - tended by a higher power or not - revved his engine and took a flying leap toward life's last great adventure.

Now, if he'd been gored to death in Pamplona - drunk on Chivas, reeling from a tattered ragful of ether, far too content to get up from his café table as the bulls came charging through the streets - that would've been easier to take.

My friend Scott Sloan - a fellow Thompson aficionado who first turned me on to Where The Buffalo Roam in high school - mutters something over the phone from Maryland about being "trampled by elephants." The words aren't exactly registering. It's been a few sleepless days and nights at the Paste magazine office in Decatur, and the news of Thompson's suicide hit me like an ice pick to the lats. You can't help but feel lost and betrayed when your heroes stab you in the back.

"Thompson, you fuck! What does it all mean? Where do we go from here?"

"For fuck-sake, man, be quiet. It's pig-balls hot down here, the swine at the front desk double-booked my suite, and the waitress at the bar in the lobby hasn't refilled my beer yet. Now, I'd appreciate some damn piece and quiet. I never asked to be your godforsaken compass. You're on your own now."

Thompson was one of the main reasons I became a journalist. I'd always put pen to paper, but not until just after my 18th birthday, when I got my head around Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, did I begin to fully understand the possibilities we face. With all the "grim, meat-hook realities" of life, you have the following options: be the sonofabitch with his hand on the meat-grinder's crank, the poor bastard being chopped to bits… or you could take the shining path; you could jam yourself into the gears of existence, raging against the forces of old and evil, ready to devour whatever shrapnel the exploding American Dream blasted your way.

But there's a certain amount of sacrifice in this rarely traveled third path. And, like so many inspired lunatics before him, Thompson eventually paid the ultimate price. Buy the ticket, take the ride, indeed. But I don't think he would've had it any other way. Rest in peace, doctor.

Steve LaBate

American Tragedy

Hunter S. Thompson was in the right place at the right time and he did the right thing, clamping down on a raw nerve in the American psyche like a cranked, crazed Gila monster, suffusing the collective consciousness with his own particular brand of poison. In the process he became the most celebrated, or at least most notorious, journalist of his era. Thompson's poison still runs through the veins of America. His trademark phrase "Fear and Loathing" and its various permutations (fear and losing, fear and loaning, fear and loading… )

have become clichés. He inspired Gary Trudeau to create his famous "Uncle Duke" character in Doonesbury, and Spider Jerusalem, the main character of Warren Ellis' comic book Transmetropolitan, is obviously inspired by Thompson.

Back in the early '70s when his fangs were still sharp, no one could draw blood like Thompson. There is no reason for me to write that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 are works of deranged genius. Many people have said it many times and there is no point in dwelling on it now.

Thompson was a creature of his times. He thrived and grew on the possibilities of the '60s and turned vicious when cornered by the reality of the '70s. He rose and fell with Nixon, running out of steam when his favorite villain was finally run out of Washington.

Thompson's own description of Nixon's ignominious departure is surprisingly joyless. He writes:

"The end came so suddenly and with so little warning that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that the scumbag has been passed to what will pose for now as another generation. The main reaction to Richard Nixon's passing - especially among journalists who had been on the Deathwatch for two years - was a wild and wordless orgasm of long awaited relief that tailed off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression that still endures."

Indeed, it is worth noting that The Great Shark Hunt is dedicated to none other than Richard Milhous Nixon and that in the introduction Thompson writes:

"I feel like I might as well be up here carving the words for my own tombstone… and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be straight off this fucking terrace and into the fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in the air and across Fifth Avenue. No one could follow that act."

One of the great literary ironies of our time may be that Thompson lived long enough to fade away, and not meet the sort of spectacular end that he imagined for himself. While he did die by his own hand, a bullet to the head is hardly original.

Thompson, in his later years, publicly recognized the awkwardness of his situation. In the introduction to his first volume of letters The Proud Highway, he writes about pretending to be dead while his old correspondence is brought to light, and again imagines an end for himself, this time a high-speed motorcycle wreck.

In Fear and Loathing in America, his second volume of letters, Thompson documents the creation of his public persona, as well as his subsequent discomfort at being forever confused with one of Ralph Steadman's illustrations. Fear and Loathing in America shows Thompson for what he really was, a workaholic writer with a brutal sense of humor who had an affinity for recreational drug use.

The most interesting disclosure in the book is the fact that Thompson was not on drugs when he sat down to write Vegas. In a letter to his Random House editor Jim Silberman, Thompson casually admits to being sober, but asks Silberman to hold his peace on the matter because the people at Rolling Stone (where Vegas was first published) were absolutely convinced that he had engaged in "a ranking freakout."

A couple of years later, Thompson feels quite differently about the image he put out there in Vegas, complaining bitterly when he is misquoted in Esquire as saying that "at least" 45 percent of what he writes is true, and becoming incensed when Gary Trudeau debuts Uncle Duke.

Reading this collection, one can't help but get the impression that Thompson was feeling pressure to keep up an act that no one could follow, and that the publication of his letters is a way once and for all to answer any questions anyone might still have about the "real" Hunter S. Thompson so that he can live out the rest of his life free from the compulsion to do himself in in a suitably dramatic manner.

Unfortunately, the letters were not enough. Thompson's suicide was the logical end to a life that had spun out of control. While he never really became the lunatic "Dr. Gonzo" from Vegas, Thompson couldn't follow his own act. He did such a good job creating his image that he could not separate it from reality. The only way Thompson could remind people he was just a man was to take his own life. And that is a tragedy.

Nathan Cain

Shadow Of A Giant

Hunter S. Thompson's body of work means more to me than the collective efforts of Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Genghis Khan and the Pope. He made music with words on a page. And of the six, he was probably the most honest, for good or ill. He was a felon in a thousand different ways every day of his adult life, but like Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest."

But beyond his work, Thompson lived by an amazingly strict (if somewhat baffling) moral code where right was right and there was no compromise. He understood that sometimes you have to make some noise and be willing to stomp on tradition and normalcy when complacency and greed set in. March on a road of bones…

This is the guy who introduced the Hell's Angels to the hippies in '65. Got clubbed in the Chicago riots at the '68 DNC. Covered every Presidential election from '68 to '92. Lived on "Hashbury" before the hippies took over. Ran for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket with a shaved head and promises of deputies on mescaline ripping up the streets with jackhammers to end the whorish development of "Fat City." And he would've won, too, if the Democrats and Republicans hadn't consolidated their bases in a last ditch effort to beat him.

"Fear and Loathing." Paranoia, desperation, crime, greed, corruption, violence and perversion. This was his stock in trade. He lived in the Belly of the Beast. Had the room at the top and expenses unlimited. He rode the Main Nerve, where it's all highs and lows and the paranoia is real because the bastards really are after you. What was clearly apparent in his writing, though, was not that the American Dream was dead and that we're all hopelessly fucked. What showed up like blood spattered on every page was an undying hope and idealism. The reason Thompson was so adept at lampooning the ills of society was because every word was packed with righteous indignation. Thompson was a close brother to the Truth. A concept as intense as The Fear can only seize a man who understands the hideousness of his surroundings because he can see the light of possibility.

Two Kennedy's and MLK - shot. Thompson called November 22, 1963 The Death of Hope. Nixon elected - twice. Vietnam dragged on. The rising tide of the '60s movement washed back out to the ocean in defeat. As the world became uglier, all that was left for a Seeker from Louisville was Fear and Loathing.

He was an experiment in the freedom of the human spirit. Of Oscar Zeta Acosta - Dr. Gonzo - Thompson once wrote, "He was a true child of the century… One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die." Res ipsa loquitur.

In later years, Thompson was reduced to a parody of his own characters and books. The line separating man and myth was erased and, to the general public, Thompson became a larger-than-life caricature of his better-known exploits. Thompson himself acknowledged this phenomenon during interviews as far back as the '70s. This is the fallacy of a sound-byte culture that needs a blurb to describe a genius. Thompson was an artist, and words were his medium. And he painted with the bold, grand strokes of a master.

Mistah Thompson, he dead, but stand back, boy, 'cause that's the shadow of a giant comin' through. Selah.

Jon Tonge

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