Thompson extricates his large frame from his ergonomically correct office chair facing the TV and lumbers over graciously to administer a hearty handshake or kiss to each caller according to gender, all with an easy effortlessness and unexpectedly old-world way that somehow underscores just who is in charge.
We talked with Thompson for twelve hours straight. Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time , was present during parts of this interview, as were a steady stream of friends. For most of the half-day that we talked, Thompson sat at his command post, chain-smoking red Dunhills through a German-made gold-tipped cigarette filter and rocking back and forth in his swivel chair. The comic savagery of his best work will continue to electrify readers for generations to come.
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music. Well, wanting to and having to are two different things.
But I had a good grounding in literature in high school. We had a literary society in town, the Athenaeum; we met in coat and tie on Saturday nights. I figured that out early. It was writing. It was the rock in my sock. Easier than algebra. It was always work, but it was always worthwhile work. I was fascinated early by seeing my byline in print. It was a rush. Still is. When I got to the Air Force, writing got me out of trouble. I enjoyed it but I wanted to get back to pilot training.
So I went up there to the base education office one day and signed up for some classes at Florida State. I got along well with a guy named Ed and I asked him about literary possibilities. But getting work out of Thompson was becoming difficult. The magazine put him up at hotels in San Francisco or Florida, and stocked his room with booze, grapefruit and speed.
He would often call Wenner at 2 a. In correspondence between Thompson and Wenner, Thompson demanded albums and speed; Wenner chastised him for blowing deadlines, keeping the staff late and even stealing cassettes from his house. Thompson had become a celebrity — and it slowed him down. He was immortalized as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury. In , Thompson traveled to a failing Saigon for a planned epic Vietnam piece, but he spent most of his time there drinking in the hotel courtyard with other correspondents.
He conducted several interviews with Jimmy Carter that the former president remembered as lengthy and revealing, but Thompson lost the tapes. Still, there were flashes of brilliance, such as his coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial in Palm Beach, Florida, which summed up the Eighties culture of greed as it was still taking form.
Thompson wrote one final piece for Rolling Stone , in In an uncharacteristically humble tone, he made a plea to readers to vote. A month later, Brinkley reported that Thompson got into a shouting match with his wife, Anita Thompson, after he nearly shot her with a pellet gun.
William S. Burroughs was a Beat Generation writer known for his startling, nontraditional accounts of drug culture, most famously in the book 'Naked Lunch. Ulysses S. Grant served as U. Prolific author Pearl S. He welcomed a daughter with reality star Khloe Kardashian in April As a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger in , Guion S.
Bluford became the first African American to travel into space. Actor Haing S. Ngor endured persecution and numerous atrocities under the Khmer Rouge before moving to the U.
Counterculture icon Hunter S. Olivia Rodrigo —. Megan Thee Stallion —. Bowen Yang —. In the mid s he was living in the Florida Keys and writing a novel that introduced a new literary persona who expresses, according to Thompson, "a brutal attitude—antihumanist.
From to Thompson wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner that was later syndicated to about 25 papers nationally. Volume 3 of the Gonzo Papers was published in as Songs of the Doomed, a collection of snippets from 30 years of writing. Thompson lived on a acre farm in Woody Creek, Colorado, near Aspen, where he was known as a compulsive hermit with a fondness for drinking, loud music, and target shooting Chinese gongs with a Magnum.
Thompson's greatest love was reported to be motorcycling. He loved to put his Ducati SP through its paces in Aspen. By age 50, Thompson had mellowed little and was charged with five felony counts of possessing drugs and possessing and storing explosives illegally, which were later dropped.
He then resumed work on his big "sex" novel, Polo Is My Life. Thompson's autobiographical Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was re-released in on the 25th anniversary of its publication. During the same year an audio adaptation of the work, narrated by Harry Dean Stanton, was produced by Margaritaville Records. Terry Gilliam formerly of Monty Python was tapped to direct a movie of the cult classic in with Johnny Depp in the role of Thompson.
The best source on Thompson's writing style and personality is Thompson himself. Biographies of Hunter include Hunter S. Thompson: an Unauthorized Biography by Peter O. Whitmer
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