Today, the Free For All is celebrating the birthday of American author, and indisputable Interesting Personality, Hunter S. Thompson!

Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on this day in 1937.  He was the eldest of three sons, born to Jack Robert Thompson, a First World War veteran and subsequently an insurance adjuster, and Virginia Ray Davidson, who was the head librarian at the Louisville Public Library.   The young Thompson enjoyed writing from an early age, but his budding career, such as it was, was cut short when his father died, leaving the family in poverty.  Thompson himself was unable to finish high school because he was arrested for abetting a robbery, and sentenced to sixty days in prison.  After his release, he joined the Air Force, serving until 1957, when he was honorably discharged as an Airman First Class.  His commanding officer wrote about him, “In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy”.

Thompson had practiced his writing throughout his military career, working as a sports editor in the local papers where he was stationed.  Following his discharge, he became a full-time journalist, and it wasn’t long before he began establishing a name for himself.  His first book, a history of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (though the club itself doesn’t use an apostrophe in its name, Thompson’s book rendered it “Hell’s Angels”, and thus it has been published since then).  Thompson spent more than a year traveling with the Hells Angels, and initially got along well with them, until they began to suspect that he was exploiting the club for personal gain.  Following a savage beating by the club, Thompson moved to Colorado, and began working on more mainstream pieces–that is to say, he began focusing on mainstream politics, the counterculture (and backlash against said counterculture) of the 1960’s, the Vietnam War, and the 1968 Democratic Convention, but did so in a way that was uniquely, fascinatingly his own.

In 1970, Thompson heard of the murder of Mexican-American television journalist Rubén Salazar, who had been shot in the head at with a tear gas canister as officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department moved against a Vietnam War protest known as the National Chicano Moratorium March.   Eager to discuss the growing racial tensions in the United Stated, but unable to place his idea into words, Thompson instead accepted a job from Sports Illustrated that would allow him to travel to California for himself and see the places he wanted to describe.  He was supposed to write a 250-word description of a local motorcycle race.  Fired by his trip, by the people he met, and the things he saw, Thompson instead submitted a 25,000 word manuscript that would become the basis for his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a Roman à clef, which means “novel in a key” in French.  The term was coined by a woman named Madeleine de Scudery in 17th century France, who wanted to write about her opinions about her own society friends and local politicians, but didn’t want to get dragged into courts for libel, so she changed their named to something colorful and descriptive, and used the veneer of fiction to tell the absolute truth.  Thompson’s work, essentially does the same with 1970’s America.  His two main characters are named Raoul Duke (meant to be Thompson himself) and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (who was really Thompson’s traveling companion Oscar Zeta Acosta, pictured at left with Thompson).  The book itself talks about their drug-filled and alcohol-soaked journey to California, but the line between fact and fiction is constantly blurred, as Thompson relates their drug-addled hallucinations as reality, and makes it nearly impossible tell the difference between the world in his characters’ heads and that going on outside it.  What is evident throughout is their mutual belief in the destruction of the American dream, and of the counter-culture of the 1960’s, which was supposed to restore some ‘goodness’ to American (and world) society.  In Thompson’s view, both dreams had ended up devouring themselves, leaving nothing by moral destitution, corruption, and disillusionment in their wake.  To quote from Fear and Loathing: 

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of…no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Though there were plenty of critics who opposed to rampant drug use in the book, it was generally clear from the beginning that it was destined to become an American classic that, in its own, very unique way, managed to capture what was best and worst in America without flinching.

Thompson was also responsible for creating “Gonzo Journalism”, a type of reporting that was very similar in style to Fear and Loathing–that is, it blended fiction and non-fiction without clear delineation, but did so in order to tell the most truth in a way that he felt traditional journalism couldn’t.  Thompson would use the style to describe any number of major events in American history, typically surrounding politics.  He was sent to cover what appeared to be the end of the Vietnam War, but arrived in Saigon hours before the fall of that city, to discover that Rolling Stone had cancelled his assignment, leaving him in one of the most chaotic and dangerous cities in the world without money or health insurance.  Though Thompson managed to get home, his relationship with the magazine that had been his primary outlet was forever soured.

Though Thompson’s production after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wasn’t prolific, he would publish another book entitled Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, documenting Nixon’s rise to the presidency, and several longer works on politics, culminating with  Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, documenting his experiencing during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential race.  His final book was The Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century, a vitriolic condemnation of America at the turn of the new century, and, particularly reflecting Thompson’s cynicism over the world since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Though he continued to write sports pieces for ESPN magazine up until his death, Thompson’s health was suffering, and he was growing increasingly despondent over his own decline.  He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home on February 20, 2005 at the age of 67.  At his funeral, apparently according to his own wishes, his ashes were fired out of a cannon and accompanied by red, white, blue and green fireworks, set the the music of of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” and Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”.  

So, happy birthday, Hunter S. Thompson.  In honor of this American original, feel free to come into the library and check out his work for yourself!  We’ll leave you with a quote from his Gonzo work, The Proud Highway:

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”