Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.
“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.
Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson’s, confirmed the death to the News.
Juan Thompson found his father’s body. Thompson’s wife, Anita, was not home at the time.
Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson’s time in Las Vegas, he is credited with pioneering New Journalism — or “gonzo journalism” — in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.
In the 1970s, Thompson was the quintessential outsider and the star of Rolling Stone magazine, an acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life.
More recently, his immortality was captured in the “Doonesbury” comic strip as Uncle Duke, the dope-taking relative of Zonker Harris.
But Garry Trudeau’s Uncle Duke character hardly endeared the cartoonist to Thompson.
“I’ve never met Garry Trudeau,” Thompson once said, “but if I ever do, I’ll set him on fire.”
Thompson’s trademark “gonzo” style was born in 1970, according to one biographer, when Thompson, holed up in a hotel room utterly unable to produce a piece about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Magazine, desperately began sending in pages of impressions from his notebook.
The term describes a style in which the journalist places himself inside the story and, as one version of the Oxford English Dictionary put it, is “a style of subjective journalism characterized by factual distortion and exaggerated rhetoric.”
In Thompson’s case, his approach involved taking or claiming to take copious amounts of psychedelic drugs.
Thompson was known for his recklessness. Before Christmas 1996, Thompson invited friends to his home near Aspen to watch him blow up a vintage Cadillac, the New York Daily News reported at the time.
“If he’s on private property, and there are no ramifications, it should be no problem,” said his friend Braudis, the Pitkin County sheriff. “He has blown up a lot of things. His safety record is impeccable.”
Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in 1937 and grew up in Louisville.
He began his writing career in the late ’50s while in the Air Force, covering sports for the base paper at Eglin Air Force Base in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla.
He achieved stardom in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Rolling Stone magazine, with his prose complemented by the wildly expressive illustrations of Ralph Steadman.
Thompson’s visibility waned as the `70s progressed, although he retained a job with Rolling Stone until 1981. He also served as the inspiration for the 1980 movie, “Where the Buffalo Roam,” starring Bill Murray as Thompson.
In 1998, Thompson’s book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. Terry Gilliam directed the tale of an oddball journalist and his psychopathic lawyer traveling to Las Vegas for a series of psychedelic escapades.
True to the participation-as-journalism style of Gonzo journalism, Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970 on the Freak Power Party ticket and narrowly lost.
For several years, Thompson has written a weekly column, Hey Rube, for ESPN.com. The most recent column, dated Feb. 15, claimed to describe a telephone phone conversation with Bill Murray about developing a new sport, shotgun golf, in which competitors shoot at each other’s golf ball.
Other books by Thompson included “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” and the collections “Generation of Swine” and “Songs of the Doomed.” His first ever novel, “The Rum Diary,” written in 1959, was first published in 1998.
Other books include “Hell’s Angels” and “The Proud Highway,” and “The Great Shark Hunt.”
His most recent effort was “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness.”
Recently, Thompson had taken up the case of a woman sentenced to life in prison in Colorado in association with the shooting death of a police officer. Thompson co-wrote an article for last June’s issue of Vanity Fair, detailing the case of Lisl Auman, who was 21 at the time of the murder and was sentenced to life without parole for her involvement.
Thompson somehow managed to be both a defender of unpopular causes and a cynical iconoclast. And he knew his place in the literature of his time.
Writing in 1970 to his editor at Random House, Thompson said that “anything I write is going to be about the death of the American Dream.”
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Quotes
`If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past 10 years, about 600 people–including me–would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.’
`The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
`I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’
`When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.’
`For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.’
`We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.’
