hunter s thompson essays

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20 great articles and essays by hunter s. thompson, misadventure, the kentucky derby is decadent and depraved, doomed love at the taco stand, on politics, freak power in the rockies, he was a crook, the motorcycle gangs, strange rumblings in aztlan, prisoner of denver, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

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Hunter s. thompson , the art of journalism no. 1, issue 156, fall 2000.

In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s  The Fountainhead , Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. . . .”

Thompson carved out his niche early. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs—all of which ended badly—before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion.

Thompson completed  The Rum Diary , his only novel to date, before he turned twenty-five; bought by Ballantine Books, it finally was published—to glowing reviews—in 1998. In 1967, Thompson published his first nonfiction book, Hell’s Angels, a harsh and incisive firsthand investigation into the infamous motorcycle gang then making the heartland of America nervous.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , which first appeared in Rolling Stone in November 1971, sealed Thompson’s reputation as an outlandish stylist successfully straddling the line between journalism and fiction writing. As the subtitle warns, the book tells of “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” in full-tilt gonzo style—Thompson’s hilarious first-person approach—and is accented by British illustrator Ralph Steadman’s appropriate drawings.

His next book,  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 , was a brutally perceptive take on the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign. A self-confessed political junkie, Thompson chronicled the 1992 presidential campaign in  Better than Sex  (1994). Thompson’s other books include  The Curse of Lono  (1983), a bizarre South Seas tale, and three collections of Gonzo Papers:  The Great Shark Hunt  (1979),  Generation of Swine  (1988) and  Songs of the Doomed  (1990).

In 1997,  The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 , the first volume of Thompson’s correspondence with everyone from his mother to Lyndon Johnson, was published. The second volume of letters,  Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976, has just been released.

Located in the mostly posh neighborhood of western Colorado’s Woody Creek Canyon, ten miles or so down-valley from Aspen, Owl Farm is a rustic ranch with an old-fashioned Wild West charm. Although Thompson’s beloved peacocks roam his property freely, it’s the flowers blooming around the ranch house that provide an unexpected high-country tranquility. Jimmy Carter, George McGovern and Keith Richards, among dozens of others, have shot clay pigeons and stationary targets on the property, which is a designated Rod and Gun Club and shares a border with the White River National Forest. Almost daily, Thompson leaves Owl Farm in either his Great Red Shark Convertible or Jeep Grand Cherokee to mingle at the nearby Woody Creek Tavern.

Visitors to Thompson’s house are greeted by a variety of sculptures, weapons, boxes of books and a bicycle before entering the nerve center of Owl Farm, Thompson’s obvious command post on the kitchen side of a peninsula counter that separates him from a lounge area dominated by an always-on Panasonic TV, always tuned to news or sports. An antique upright piano is piled high and deep enough with books to engulf any reader for a decade. Above the piano hangs a large Ralph Steadman portrait of “Belinda”—the Slut Goddess of Polo. On another wall covered with political buttons hangs a Che Guevara banner acquired on Thompson’s last tour of Cuba. On the counter sits an IBM Selectric typewriter—a Macintosh computer is set up in an office in the back wing of the house.

The most striking thing about Thompson’s house is that it isn’t the weirdness one notices first: it’s the words. They’re everywhere—handwritten in his elegant lettering, mostly in fading red Sharpie on the blizzard of bits of paper festooning every wall and surface: stuck to the sleek black leather refrigerator, taped to the giant TV, tacked up on the lampshades; inscribed by others on framed photos with lines like, “For Hunter, who saw not only fear and loathing, but hope and joy in ’72—George McGovern”; typed in IBM Selectric on reams of originals and copies in fat manila folders that slide in piles off every counter and table top; and noted in many hands and inks across the endless flurry of pages.

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. This was nothing out of the ordinary for the host: Owl Farm operates like an eighteenth-century salon, where people from all walks of life congregate in the wee hours for free exchanges about everything from theoretical physics to local water rights, depending on who’s there. Walter Isaacson, managing editor of  Time , was present during parts of this interview, as were a steady stream of friends. Given the very late hours Thompson keeps, it is fitting that the most prominently posted quote in the room, in Thompson’s hand, twists the last line of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “Rage, rage against the coming of the light.”

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. Behind Thompson’s sui generis personality lurks a trenchant humorist with a sharp moral sensibility. His exaggerated style may defy easy categorization, but his career-long autopsy on the death of the American dream places him among the twentieth century’s most exciting writers. 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.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Well, wanting to and having to are two different things. Originally I hadn’t thought about writing as a solution to my problems. But I had a good grounding in literature in high school. We’d cut school and go down to a café on Bardstown Road where we would drink beer and read and discuss Plato’s parable of the cave. We had a literary society in town, the Athenaeum; we met in coat and tie on Saturday nights. I hadn’t adjusted too well to society—I was in jail for the night of my high school graduation—but I learned at the age of fifteen that to get by you had to find the one thing you can do better than anybody else . . . at least this was so in my case. 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 was assigned to pilot training at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola in northwest Florida, but I was shifted to electronics . . . advanced, very intense, eight-month school with bright guys . . . I enjoyed it but I wanted to get back to pilot training. Besides, I’m afraid of electricity. 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. He asked me if I knew anything about sports, and I said that I had been the editor of my high-school paper. He said, “Well, we might be in luck.” It turned out that the sports editor of the base newspaper, a staff sergeant, had been arrested in Pensacola and put in jail for public drunkenness, pissing against the side of a building; it was the third time and they wouldn’t let him out.

So I went to the base library and found three books on journalism. I stayed there reading them until it closed. Basic journalism. I learned about headlines, leads: who, when, what, where, that sort of thing. I barely slept that night. This was my ticket to ride, my ticket to get out of that damn place. So I started as an editor. Boy, what a joy. I wrote long Grantland Rice-type stories. The sports editor of my hometown  Louisville Courier Journal  always had a column, left-hand side of the page. So I started a column.

By the second week I had the whole thing down. I could work at night. I wore civilian clothes, worked off base, had no hours, but I worked constantly. I wrote not only for the base paper,  The Command Courier , but also the local paper,  The Playground News . I’d put things in the local paper that I couldn’t put in the base paper. Really inflammatory shit. I wrote for a professional wrestling newsletter. The Air Force got very angry about it. I was constantly doing things that violated regulations. I wrote a critical column about how Arthur Godfrey, who’d been invited to the base to be the master of ceremonies at a firepower demonstration, had been busted for shooting animals from the air in Alaska. The base commander told me: “Goddamn it, son, why did you have to write about Arthur Godfrey that way?”

When I left the Air Force I knew I could get by as a journalist. So I went to apply for a job at  Sports Illustrated . I had my clippings, my bylines, and I thought that was magic . . . my passport. The personnel director just laughed at me. I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve been sports editor for  two  papers.” He told me that their writers were judged not by the work they’d done, but where they’d done it. He said, “Our writers are all Pulitzer Prize winners from  The New York Times . This is a helluva place for you to  start . Go out into the boondocks and improve yourself.”

I was shocked. After all, I’d broken the Bart Starr story.

INTERVIEWER

What was that?

At Eglin Air Force Base we always had these great football teams. The Eagles. Championship teams. We could beat up on the University of Virginia. Our bird-colonel Sparks wasn’t just any yo-yo coach. We recruited. We had these great players serving their military time in ROTC. We had Zeke Bratkowski, the Green Bay quarterback. We had Max McGee of the Packers. Violent, wild, wonderful drunk. At the start of the season McGee went AWOL, appeared at the Green Bay camp and he never came back. I was somehow blamed for his leaving. The sun fell out of the firmament. Then the word came that we were getting Bart Starr, the All-American from Alabama. The Eagles were going to roll! But then the staff sergeant across the street came in and said, “I’ve got a terrible story for you. Bart Starr’s not coming.” I managed to break into an office and get out his files. I printed the order that showed he was being discharged medically. Very serious leak.

The Bart Starr story was not enough to impress  Sports Illustrated ?

The personnel guy there said, “Well, we do have this trainee program.” So I became a kind of copy boy.

You eventually ended up in San Francisco. With the publication in 1967 of  Hell’s Angels , your life must have taken an upward spin.

All of a sudden I had a book out. At the time I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t even get a job driving a cab in San Francisco, much less writing. Sure, I had written important articles for  The Nation  and  The Observer , but only a few good journalists really knew my byline. The book enabled me to buy a brand new BSA 650 Lightning, the fastest motorcycle ever tested by  Hot Rod  magazine. It validated everything I had been working toward. If  Hell’s Angels  hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  or anything else. To be able to earn a living as a freelance writer in this country is damned hard; there are very few people who can do that.  Hell’s Angels  all of a sudden proved to me that, Holy Jesus, maybe I can do this. I knew I was a good journalist. I knew I was a good writer, but I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing.

With the swell of creative energy flowing throughout the San Francisco scene at the time, did you interact with or were you influenced by any other writers?

Ken Kesey for one. His novels  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  and  Sometimes a Great Notion  had quite an impact on me. I looked up to him hugely. One day I went down to the television station to do a roundtable show with other writers, like Kay Boyle, and Kesey was there. Afterwards we went across the street to a local tavern and had several beers together. I told him about the Angels, who I planned to meet later that day, and I said, “Well, why don’t you come along?” He said, “Whoa, I’d  like  to meet these guys.” Then I got second thoughts, because it’s never a good idea to take strangers along to meet the Angels. But I figured that this was Ken Kesey, so I’d try. By the end of the night Kesey had invited them all down to La Honda, his woodsy retreat outside of San Francisco. It was a time of extreme turbulence—riots in Berkeley. He was always under assault by the police—day in and day out, so La Honda was like a war zone. But he had a lot of the literary, intellectual crowd down there, Stanford people also, visiting editors, and Hell’s Angels. Kesey’s place was a real cultural vortex.

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The art of fiction no. 178.

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected  City of Glass , the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas,  Ghosts  and  The Locked Room , came out the next year. Paul Auster was thirty-eight. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem  White Spaces had been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.

   Auster has written about those prepublication years in  Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure  (1997). He studied at Columbia University in the late sixties, then worked for a few months on an oil tanker before moving to Paris where he eked out a living as a translator. He started a little magazine,  Little Hand , and an independent publishing house of the same name with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. In 1972 his first book, a collection of translations titled  A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems , was published. He returned to New York City in 1974 and, among other ventures, tried to sell a baseball card game he had invented. In 1982, Auster published his first prose book,  The Invention of Solitude , a memoir and meditation on fatherhood that he started writing shortly after his father’s death.

   Auster has published a book almost annually since the trilogy: In 1987 the novel  In the Country of Last Things  appeared. His other novels include  Moon Palace  (1989),  The Music of Chance  (1990),  Leviathan  (1992), and  The Book of Illusions  (2002). Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991 (he was elevated to an officer in 1997).

   The range of Auster’s work is remarkable—novels, essays, translations, poems, plays, songs, and collaborations with artists (including Sophie Calle and Sam Messer). He has also written three screenplays:  Smoke  (1995),  Blue in the Face  (1995), and  Lulu on the Bridge (1998), which he directed as well.  Oracle Night , his ninth novel, will be published later this year.

   The following conversation started last fall with a live interview at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The interview was completed one afternoon this summer at Auster’s home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. A gracious host, he apologized for the workers who were installing central air conditioning in their nineteenth-century brownstone, then gave a brief tour: The living room is decorated with paintings by his friends Sam Messer and David Reed. In their front hall, there is a collection of family photographs. Bookshelves line the walls of his office on the ground floor. And, of course, on his desk the famous typewriter.

Let’s start by talking about the way you work. About how you write.

PAUL AUSTER

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

And you write in notebooks. Not legal pads or loose sheets of paper.

Yes, always in notebooks. And I have a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.

But what about the famous Olympia typewriter? We know quite a bit about that machine—last year you published a wonderful book with the painter Sam Messer,  The Story of My Typewriter .

I’ve owned that typewriter since 1974—more than half my life now. I bought it second-hand from a college friend and at this point it must be about forty years old. It’s a relic from another age, but it’s still in good condition. It’s never broken down. All I have to do is change ribbons every once in a while. But I’m living in fear that a day will come when there won’t be any ribbons left to buy—and I’ll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.

A great Paul Auster story. The day when you go out to buy that last ribbon.

I’ve made some preparations. I’ve stocked up. I think I have about sixty or seventy ribbons in my room. I’ll probably stick with that typewriter till the end, although I’ve been sorely tempted to give it up at times. It’s cumbersome and inconvenient, but it also protects me against laziness.

Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process. You’ve finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written. It’s bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That’s the moment when I always wish I’d switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it “reading with my fingers,” and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I’m finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there’s more work to be done.

Let’s go back to the notebooks for a minute. Quinn, in  City of Glass , records his observations in a red notebook. Anna Blume, the narrator of  In the Country of Last Things , composes her letter in a blue notebook. In  Mr. Vertigo , Walt writes his autobiography in thirteen hardbound school composition books. And Willy G. Christmas, the demented hero of  Timbuktu , has lugged his entire life’s work to Baltimore to give to his high-school English teacher before he dies: seventy-four notebooks of “poems, stories, essays, diary entries, epigrams, autobiographical musings, and the first eighteen-hundred lines of an epic-in-progress,  Vagabond Days .” Notebooks also figure in your most recent novels,  The Book of Illusions  and  Oracle Night . To say nothing of your collection of true stories,  The Red Notebook . What are we to make of this?

I suppose I think of the notebook as a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination. I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction. As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world. The manuscript as hero, so to speak.  Wuthering Heights  is that kind of novel.  The Scarlet Letter  is another. The frames are fictitious, of course, but they give a groundedness and credibility to the stories that other novels didn’t have for me. They posit the work as an illusion—which more traditional forms of narrative don’t—and once you accept the “unreality” of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story—not just a detached observer.

From the Archive, Issue 167

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Fear and Loathing in Modern Media: Hunter S. Thompson on Journalism, Politics, and the Subjective

By maria popova.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it “vengeful” and “primitive” and “perverse” regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. “That kind of stuff is opinion,” they say, “and the reader is cheated if it’s not labelled as opinion.” Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal “objective journalism.” Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called “advocacy journalism,” I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

But it took Thompson decades to develop his stance, the germ of which can even be felt a 1958 letter to Jerome H. Walker — long before the term “gonzo” was even coined in reference to a 1970 article of Thompson’s — found in the anthology The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I ( public library ). In the letter, he addresses the subject more obliquely but with the same unequivocal intimation:

Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for TIME magazine.

In Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 ( public library ), published in 1973, he returns to the subject:

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone 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.

In a 1997 interview for The Atlantic , Thompson reiterates his conviction, but adds a necessary distinction:

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective .

Flat-out lying, in fact, is something Thompson attributes to politicians whose profession he likens to a deadly addiction. In Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie , the very title of which speaks to the analogy, he writes:

Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics — especially in presidential campaigns. That is when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else. They are salmon, and they must spawn. They are addicts.

Later, he resurrects the junkie analogy in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 and ties it back to journalism:

Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.

Complement with this fantastic animation of Thompson on the burden of the living and his graphic biography , which was among the best graphic novels and graphic nonfiction of 2012 .

— Published July 18, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/07/18/hunter-s-thompson-journalism-politics/ —

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Behind the Dedications: Hunter S. Thompson

A look at the family, friends and substances to which thompson dedicated his books.

On February 16, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson was sitting in his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. Football season had just ended, which always left him morose, but he was also suffering from surgery-related pain in his hip and back, which made walking difficult—to say nothing of his favorite activities, swimming and blowing things up. Instead, the then 67-year-old author composed a typewritten note addressed to himself:

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.

Four days later, Thompson shot himself. He was sitting at the kitchen table, where he did much of his writing.

Before his death, Thompson had published 15 books—some journalism, some fiction, many his own brand of the two, which a friend dubbed “gonzo journalism.” Throughout those works, Thompson pays tribute to his family, friends and influences, often through dedications, although sometimes in exceedingly vague terms. His masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , for example, is in part dedicated to Bob Geiger “for reasons that need not be explained here.” Those reasons are explained below.

“To Sandy, who endured almost a year of grim exile in Washington, DC while this book was being written.”

– Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72

Sandy Thompson (nee Conklin; now Sondi Wright) was Hunter’s first wife. The two met through mutual friends in New York City in 1958. Reflecting on first falling for Hunter in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson , an oral biography by Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour, Sandy declares, “The only way to say it is that I was just gone. Absolutely gone.” In a letter from The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman , a collection of Hunter’s correspondence, he pleads with her to visit him in Puerto Rico, where he had moved in 1960. Hunter writes:

I am still honest enough to say I want you to come down and, if you do nothing else, merely lie naked with me on this living room bed and stare at the sea… I am also honest enough to admit that wanting you over this past weekend rubbed raw some part of me that’s been well-insulated for quite a while.

Sandy did eventually visit, and three years later, the couple wed.

In order for Hunter to cover the presidential campaign in 1972, the family, which now included their eight-year-old son Juan, moved from their home in Woody Creek to DC. These articles for Rolling Stone would eventually be compiled into the lauded Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 (“The best account yet published of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process,” according to The New York Times Book Review ), but the experience also put inhuman strain on Sandy. As Wenner, Hunter’s editor at Rolling Stone , says in Gonzo :

Sandy was not only his wife but also his full-time assistant. She was the one typing the manuscripts, filing, and doing all the administrative work, and she was also the recipient of Hunter’s abusive behavior and unrelenting late-night irritability.

Unsurprisingly, the union did not last. Sandy left Hunter in 1980, after 17 years of marriage. She saw him through the publication of his first four books—a selection which undoubtedly contains his finest work, and in which she undoubtedly played an indelible role.

“To Juan and… To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down.”

– The Great Shark Hunt

Thompson’s only child, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, was born in 1964. A month after Juan’s birth, Thompson—beaming in his own way—wrote to a friend:

My son is here with me; he can’t sleep at night except by the typewriter. … He groans and thrashes about constantly, as if in close combat with the dark forces of reaction. He has a dangerous amount of energy and a huge set of balls, a sure formula for trouble.

Nixon, on the other hand, was Thompson’s one true nemesis. By 1963, Thompson was already writing to one of his editors, “With a hairy animal called Nixon looming once again on the horizon, I am ready to believe that we are indeed in ‘the time of the end.’” After the two men met in 1968 on the campaign trail, Thompson described Nixon as “a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream.” That hatred only grew through the president’s first term and with the prospect of his second. On the eve of the presidential election in 1972, Thompson railed in Rolling Stone , “Nixon represents the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.” Even upon Nixon’s death in 1994, Thompson seethed in his obituary, “He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.”

In their own ways, then, both Juan and Nixon inspired the essays and articles that Thompson wrote throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, the best of which are collected in The Great Shark Hunt .

“To Bob Geiger, for reasons that need not be explained here—and to Bob Dylan, for Mister Tambourine Man ”

– Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The most mysterious of Thompson’s dedications is to Bob Geiger, an orthopedic surgeon from Sonoma, California. Geiger’s wife had met Sandy at a town square, where they struck up a conversation about children (they both had one-year-olds) and writing (Geiger was a novelist). The Geigers invited the Thompsons over for dinner and a friendship blossomed.

In Gonzo , Geiger himself guesses at his dedication:

People think that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is dedicated to me because they think I was supplying Hunter with drugs, but the main reason is that I would drive down to San Francisco almost every night, and Hunter and I would read through the Hell’s Angels manuscript page by page, word by word.

No doubt a contributing factor, but not an explanation as to why Fear and Loathing— as opposed to Hell’s Angels— is dedicated to Geiger. The whole truth likely includes an instance in the mid 60s, when the Thompsons were evicted from their apartment (after Hunter and Bob were shooting at gophers) and the Geigers housed them for some time. But even more relevant to the gonzo nature of Fear and Loathing may be this quote from Geiger:

I had published a novel, and Hunter had this horse’s-ass idea that it was supposed to be important to be a fiction writer. I would try to point out to him, “Hunter, you are writing fiction. All writing is fiction. Experiences you experience, and words are words, so everything is fiction.”

As for Bob Dylan, he was Thompson’s favorite musician. Of the author’s musical taste, his literary executor Doug Brinkley says, “He knew what he liked … it was Dylan first and foremost.” In a letter to a friend, Thompson himself writes, “Dylan is a goddamn phenomenon, pure gold, and mean as a snake.”

Dylan’s song “Mister Tambourine Man” was particularly close to Thompson’s heart—and to Fear and Loathing . In a memo to his editor at Rolling Stone , which published an early version of the novel, Thompson even compares his book to Dylan’s song, writing, “The central problem here is that you’re working overtime to treat this thing as Straight or at least Responsible journalism … You’d be better off trying to make objective, chronological sense of … ‘Mister Tambourine Man.’”

Thompson’s memo hints at a more significant, if personal connection between his book and Dylan’s song. Years earlier, Thompson documented at length what “Mister Tambourine Man” meant to him:

This, to me, is the Hippy National Anthem. … To anyone who was part of that (post-beat) scene before the word “hippy” became a national publicity landmark (in 1966 and 1967), “Mr. Tambourine Man” is both an epitaph and a swan-song for the lifestyle and the instincts that led, eventually, to the hugely-advertised “hippy phenomenon.”

Those reflections were published in another collection of his letters, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist , and reveal a sentiment that rings so close to Thompson’s own ideas about the hippie era, as captured in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas :

San Francisco in the middle 60s was a very special time and place to be a part of. … 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.

At his request, “Mister Tambourine Man” was also played at Thompson’s funeral, after his ashes were shot from fireworks, in true gonzo style.

For more on Hunter S. Thompson and those he loved, see Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson , The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman and Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist .

Featured illustration: Gabriella Shery

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Hunter S. Thompson Essay. “Open Letter To The Youth Of Our Nation” 1955

Hunter wrote this essay in 1955 for The Athenaeum Literary Association’s bound yearbook, it won third prize in The Nettleroth contest. Great writing for an 18 year old, and makes for a funny read too.

Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and hark-en the call of the future! Do you realise you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation? Do you realise that the fate of the world and of generations to come rests on your shoulders? Do you realise that at any time you may be called on to protect your country and the freedom of the world from the creeping scourge of communism? How can you possibly laugh in the face of the disasters which face us all from all sides? Oh ignorant youth, the world is not a joyous place. The time has come for you to dispense with the frivolous pleasures of childhood and get down to honest toil until you are sixty-five. Then and only then can you relax and collect your social security and live happily until the time of your death. Also your insolent attitude disturbs me greatly. You have the nerve to say that you have never known what it is like to live in a secure and peaceful world; you say that the present generation has balled things up to the extent that we now face a war so terrible that the very thought of it makes hardened veterans shudder; you say it is our fault that World War ll was fought in vein; you say that it is impossible to lay plans for the future until you are sure you have a future. I say Nonsense! None of these things matter. If you expect a future you must carve it out in the face of these things. You also say that you must wait until after you have served your time with the service to settle down. Ridiculous! It is a man’s duty to pull up stakes and serve his country at any time, then settle down again.

I say there is no excuse for a feeling of insecurity on your part; there is no excuse for juvenile delinquency; there is no excuse for your attitude except that you are rotten and lazy! I was never like that! I worked hard; I saved; I didn’t run around and stay out late at night; I carved out my own future through hard work and virtuous living, and look at me now: a respectful and successful man.

I warn you, if you don’t start now it will be too late, and the blame for the end of the world will be laid at your feet. Heed my warning, oh depraved and profligate youth; I say awake, awake, awake!

Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite.

Spread the word!

Join the conversation 34 comments.

I love the fighting against Communism/retiring with Social Security.

Awesome. Thank you for posting this.

Be perpetually ready for everything, and if you aren’t, then you cannot complain about being caught off guard. Physically, Mentally, Kinesthetically, and Intelligence-wise.

Ha! ..and just look at how sweet we have it now.

Ha! indeed Roger, you speak a serious truth. Don’t we all love staying up late more than ever? and yet if Hunter was alive today, he’d surely still recognize that capitalism has the blue collar man in chains. Nothing has changed.

This guy has been brainwashed by the “pleasures” of capitalism. Be a good little drone and your life will be great as soon as you’re old enough to retire. What a joke, and he has the nerve to call his generation’s youth rebellious, lazy, ‘delinquents”, when he is sitting on his high horse stroking his own ego. A “successful and respectful” “man” should be respectful of the generation that will be paying his own social security check when he turns 65. It is just that this essay is signed John J. Righteous-Hypocrite.

Corrupt Youth: Have you ever HEARD of Hunter S. Thompson? The man was a genius at social criticism and was being clearly sarcastic here…he is not “sitting on a high horse” or “stroking his ego,” but rather making a scathing social commentary. Read up next time before you make yourself look like a fool.

I think a lot of comment makers here totally missed the point… the indignant people make me laugh. Sarcasm, people, sarcasm! and oh so true. My teachers tell me that things are so aweful. They tell me the world is coming to major turning points. They say that the worst problems we’ve ever seen are coming to fruition. Well, now, didn’t they say the same thing to you when you were young? Weren’t we all alike as young people?

so seriously, people, stop taking yourselves so seriously.

I like this a lot.

Huge hunter thompson fan. This is brilliant/hilarious. I definitely can’t miss pointing out that corrupt youth, you are a complete idiot! Did you even read this before you posted something? If you can’t see the sarcasm in the writting then clearly the end shows you. Seriously smarten up!

Just discovered your site – it’s great. Great post!

I would like to consider myself one of the youth of the age, and would like to point out that this is obvious satire. I’m sorry it struck the hearts of some people the wrong way, but go back, look at it like an episode of House, and laugh like you’re supposed to.

Go slowly with Corrupt Youth. I used to be appalled that some people are not amused by satire, nor do they see the truths that satire can reveal. I used to think that such people were “stupid” or intellectually lazy or childish in their thinking. Not so. Some people–as bright as they may be in other areas–simply lack the capacity for the sort of multi-dimensional thinking necessary to understanding satire–or sarcasm. It is not even a question of whether they would agree with the revealed truth—explained slowly and in flat, linear terms, I think Corrupt Youth WILL agree with Thompson’s message.

Well spoken Relic,The vast numbers of intellectually handicapped in this land frightens me sometimes.Hunter had a way of telling someone there an idiot and have them walk away thinking they have been complimented.Common sense really isn’t that common.

Corrupt Youth’s final sentence “It is just that this essay is signed John J. Righteous-Hypocrite.” tells me that he DOES both understand and agree with Thompson. He’s refuting Righteous, as we all are, and I think that most comments missed that. Regardless, that’s all off topic I suppose. Nice essay.

Yea, well autism is like that. You can’t get sarcasms that well when suffering autism or aspergers.

Righteous-Hypocrite/Santorum 2012! “A Frothy Mixture Of Liberty & Democracy FTW!”

Just graduated high school and I identify with this. 😦

[…] Note 01: Table Manners With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson, there is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a reporter in the depths of a press lunch […]

for those who did not get the sarcasm,look at ‘who’ it is written by, after Fearfully and disgustedly yours-‘John J. Righteous-Hypocrite’…if this is not sarcastic enough, i don’t know what is…

@corrupt youth: you make me laugh. You are so incredibly stupid, and it blows my mind.

Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite. Fearfully and disgustedly yours, John J. Righteous-Hypocrite.

IS THAT NOT CLEAR OR WHAT?!?!!? HELOOOOO!!!! SARCASM!!!! Oh.. Wait… Maybe some idiots are needing me to be more clear… so..

Sarcasm work this way… I say… “Oh look what a beautifull day to go walking” and I enter my home again… while outside theres a tornado… YOU GET IT????

I didn´t really meant what I´ve said… was a joke… Now I don´t think I have to tell you what that is…( I hope)

Stop making fools of yourselves answering to this publication with comments like “corrupt youth: you make me laugh. You are so incredibly stupid, and it blows my mind”… Really VICE ( if that even your name)… You are so incredibly stupid, and it blows my mind.

love hunter s. thompson, drug addict or not (; speaking of drugs… anyone notice his reference in saying world war 2 was fought “in vein” ? lol obscure smack reff ftw??? love this man he was a genius, and besides the drug reference this piece is lovely and dripping with sarcasm and still rings true today, like any good piece of historical American commentary!!

The people on this link are incredibly cruel. Why has this essay attracted such haters who claim to understand the sarcasm used in this essay and be so eager to chastise an honest mistake so brutally? I’m sorry CY that you were treated this way.

i expect that after several years of this piece being here, and it never needing to be commented on (and me never feeling compelled to) it will suddenly be littered with comments, as is already occurring.

the trolling and the hatred so typical of internet forums and threads will proliferate, and has already begun, taking away from what should have brought people here, and all that people should have left with. all that matters is what YOU think of this piece – not these comments. leave it alone. just for once.

until the occupy protests this post had been heavily viewed but uncommented on.

Hunter S. Thompson Essay. 1955 well, its now more than 55years old – whats changed? MANY and NOTHING !! Its the wrong way to use our brain – if we starting discussions like this – no – LOOK in the HISTORY last 2000years if for you its not enough – last 5000years. Evolution now everywhere of course in different levels and territories – but if we continue to kill our planet,animals and humans from today – never we reach the next step in the evolution: BRAIN HOMO SAPIENS We 99% have to use our brain now to change the course where we going in the same boat, that means also all Governments, Shareholders and other rich. Some areas have woods or minerals, some other have technologies, some other have nothing – but we’re all together one world where we can live or not all together with air, water, oceans, energy and food. reconnomend song: Bob Marley – ONE LOVE

[…] Open Letter to The Youth of Our Nation – Hunter S. Thompson […]

[…] Hunter S Thompson’s open letter to the youth of the nation (in 1955) – hstbooks.org/2008/08/03/hunter-s-thompson-essay-open-letter-to-the-youth-of-our-nation-1955 […]

Hunter was a fracking genius. I love the essay! Amazing man, with amazing skills.

Love this piece, thanks for posting it ! There is always room for truth in a world brimming with lies. I wish HST was still alive, I would love to read his take on our current financial woes. No doubt, it would have been nothing short of great.

Reblogged this on goetzvonberlinchingen and commented: Add your thoughts here… (optional)

Reblogged this on J.C. Henderson's blog and commented: Really well written letter by a young Hunter S. Thompson. I like the term “Doom Generation” as well, seems appropriate even for today with this Doom and Gloom society we all seem to be living in.

I like how he signed off his name as much as the rest of it. Hmmm….he did mistakenly write “fought in vein…” I suppose that’s allowed of an 18-yr-old. Well, the question then remains…of the ones he addressed who are living…who are into their 70s and 80s. DID they salvage their older years?

In case you didn’t get to this….just thought you might want to chk out: http://aholisticjourney.wordpress.com/page/3/

[…] Hunter S. Thompson Essay. “Open Letter To The Youth Of Our Nation” 1955. […]

[…] each generation has thought of itself as doomed. Hunter Thompson said as much in his essay, Open Letter to The Youth of Our Nation, which he penned in 1955 at the tender age of eighteen. In it, Thompson takes on the heartily […]

Comments are closed.

About Marty

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• 09.10.22 We’re Back
• 04.11.18 Letters To The Editor Rolling Stone.
• 10.02.17 Hunter, Don Johnson And Nash Bridges
• 09.28.17 Hunter S. Thompson in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy
• 05.19.17 Better Than Sex

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Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He grew up in a middle-class family; his childhood was relatively tranquil. However, this changed in 1952 when Thompson's father, a public insurance adjuster, died of an autoimmune disease called Myasthenia Gravis . After the elder Thompson's death, the family was plunged into poverty, and Thompson's mother, Virginia, became an alcoholic. Although young Hunter was heavily involved in clubs at his high school, including the...

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Hunter S. Thompson Essays

Decadence and the simulacra: a perverse look within hunter s. thompson’s fear and loathing in las vegas anonymous college, fear and loathing in las vegas.

Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is his magnum opus and in it, that is exactly what he does, which is to endure a “savage journey to the heart of the American dream”....

Shocking the Reader in American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange Rory Ian Chisholm 12th Grade

The controversy surrounding Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange relates primarily to the central themes that are explored in both books. Nevertheless, the brutality and explicit expression that drench...

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Thompson’s Satire of the American Dream Nathan Young College

The American Dream is a concept that first takes on its concrete form in The Epic of America; it is described as "That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his...

The Concept of Goodness: as captured by Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and The Book of Daniel Jack David Garceau College

In "Book VI" of the Republic, Plato states that the good in our souls is the "...authentic source of truth and reason," that the good is the cause of all"...that is right and beautiful (Plato 517c)," that it is through reference to the idea of the...

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13 Great Articles and Essays by Hunter S. Thompson

Posted by John | Aug 18, 2020 | Essays | 0 |

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, and the founder of the gonzo journalism movement. He first rose to prominence with the publication of Hell’s Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to write a first-hand account of the lives and experiences of its members.

In 1970, he wrote an unconventional magazine feature titled “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly, which both raised his profile and established him as a writer with counterculture credibility. It also set him on a path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called “Gonzo”, which was essentially an ongoing experiment in which the writer becomes a central figure and even a participant in the events of the narrative.

Thompson remains best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), a book first serialized in Rolling Stone in which he grapples with the implications of what he considered the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement. It was adapted on film twice: loosely in Where the Buffalo Roam starring Bill Murray as Thompson in 1980, and directly in 1998 by director Terry Gilliam in a film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. The Doonesbury cartoon character Duke – who was modeled after Thompson – pens an essay about “my shoplifting conviction” titled “Fear and Loathing at Macy’s Menswear”, a reference to Thompson’s book.

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

Hunter s. thompson.

The telephone rang at Warren Hinckle’s San Francisco home at about 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday, April 29, 1970. When Hinckle picked up the receiver, he heard the unmistakable voice of Hunter S. Thompson, calling from Aspen, proclaiming, “Goddammit, Scanlan’s has to cover the Derby. It’s important.”

The pitch, even at the late hour and the late date (barely 72 hours before the race itself), was fairly irresistible. Send Thompson, still finding his distinctive voice in countercultural journalism, to his hometown of Louisville to cover the drunken, debauched scene at Churchill Downs for Scanlan‘s, the anti-establishment (some would say subversive) monthly magazine for which Hinckle was co-editor.

Doomed Love at the Taco Stand

Going to Hollywood is a dangerous high-pressure gig for most people, under any circumstances. It is like pumping hot steam into thousands of different-size boilers. The laws of physics mandate that some will explode before others–although all of them will explode sooner or later unless somebody cuts off the steam.

I love steam myself, and I have learned to survive under savage and unnatural pressures. I am a steam freak. Hollywood is chicken feed to me. I can take it or leave it. I have been here before, many times. On some days it seems like I have lived at the Chateau Marmont for half my life. There is blood on these walls, and some of it is mine. Last night I sliced off the tips of two fingers and bled so profusely in the elevator that they had to take it out of service.

Freak Power in the Rockies

A Memoir and Rambling Discussion (with Rude Slogans) of Freak Power in the Rockies… on the Weird Mechanics of Running a Takeover Bid on a Small Town… and a Vulgar Argument for Seizing Political Power and Using It like a Gun Ripped Away from a Cop… with Jangled Comments on the Uncertain Role of the Head and the Awful Stupor Factor… and Other Disorganized Notes on ‘How to Punish the Fatbacks,’ How to Make Sure that Today’s Pig Is Tomorrow’s Offal… and Why This Crazed New World Can Only Be Dealt with by… A New Posse!

‘Just how weird can you stand it, brother — before your love will crack?’ — Mike Lydon in Ramparts, March, 1970 Two hours before the polls closed we realized that we had no headquarters — no hole or Great Hall where the faithful could gather for the awful election-night deathwatch. Or to celebrate the Great Victory that suddenly seemed very possible.

He Was a Crook

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing – a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family.

Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that ‘I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.’

The Motorcycle Gangs

Last Labor Day weekend newspapers all over California gave front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula. Two girls, aged 14 and 15, were allegedly taken from their dates by a gang of filthy, frenzied, boozed-up motorcycle hoodlums called “Hell’s Angels,” and dragged off to be “repeatedly assaulted.”

A deputy sheriff, summoned by one of the erstwhile dates, said he “arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire surrounded by cyclists of both sexes. Then the two sobbing, near-hysterical girls staggered out of the darkness, begging for help. One was completely nude and the other had on only a torn sweater.”

Strange Rumblings in Aztlan

‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan’ is a long article about many things. HST touches every front he possibly can while reporting the death of Ruben Salazar, a nationally known Mexican American reporter for the LA Times. ‘Aztlan’, in style, is similar to HST’s South American reporting, however it teeters at gonzo in some parts.

The story was important enough to be included in The Rolling Stone Reader (1974) and the Modern Library version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories. In fact, it was this article that touched off Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Memo’s From the National Affairs Desk

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.’ – REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing–apolitical monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.

Prisoner of Denver

Just 22, Lisl Auman was convicted in 1998 of the felony murder of a police officer, a crime she didn’t commit, and is serving life in prison without parole. This summer, three years after gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson began his campaign to free Lisl, Colorado’s Supreme Court will rule on her appeal.

Mark Seal joins Thompson in exposing the brutality, corruption, and arcane legal strategy which doomed an innocent young woman—and threatens every other American.

The Hippies

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run.

But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.

And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

The Song of the Sausage Creature

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them – but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack – and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you… There is, after all, not a pig’s eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

Fear and Loathing in America

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

Rare Early Articles

Some of Hunter S. Thompson’s rare articles, downloadable in PDF. Among the titles are – Big Sur: The Tropic of Henry Miller – Hunter S. Thompson (Rogue Oct. 1961), “It Ain’t Hardly That Way No More” – Hunter S. Thompson (Pageant Sept. 1965), The 450-Square Mile Parking Lot – Hunter S. Thompson (Pageant Dec. 1965), Why Boys Will Be Girls – Hunter S. Thompson (Pageant Aug. 1967), Nights In The Rustic – Hunter S. Thompson (Cavilier Aug ’67), War Correspondent – Hunter S. Thompson (War News March 2nd 1991), Community of Whores – Hunter S. Thompson (Northwest Extra May 1990), Another Vicious Attack – Hunter S. Thompson (Northwest Sextra, Long Hot 1990 Summer), Song of the Sausage Creature – Hunter S. Thompson (Cycle World Mar. ’95).

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by Hunter S. Thompson (1955).

Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences.

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Hunter S. Thompson's 9/11 Essay Is Still Chillingly Accurate 16 Years Later

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, no one knew exactly what the future would hold.

However, writer Hunter S. Thompson turned out to be amazingly prescient.

Shortly after the tragedy, the famed gonzo journalist wrote an essay for ESPN.com where he laid out his thoughts on what could happen in this new era.

Sixteen years later, his remarks are still chillingly accurate:

“Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.”

Thompson wrote that the United States is “going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say.”

He continued:

“Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.”

Thompson, who died in 2005 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, also laid out how then-President George W. Bush would react to the attack and how his decisions would affect the lives of everyday Americans.

“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. “ He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job ― armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.”

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Hunter S. Thompson Writes a Blistering, Over-the-Top Letter to Anthony Burgess (1973)

in Letters | May 24th, 2016 9 Comments

We know Antho­ny Burgess for hav­ing writ­ten  A Clock­work Orange , but in total, accord­ing to Shaun Ush­er’s  More Let­ters of Note: Cor­re­spon­dence Deserv­ing of a Wider Audi­ence   (a book based on the well-known blog ), he “pub­lished 33 nov­els, 25 non­fic­tion titles, pro­duced poet­ry, short sto­ries and screen­plays, com­posed three sym­phonies, wrote hun­dreds of musi­cal pieces, and spoke nine lan­guages flu­ent­ly.” Yet even such a “pro­lif­ic, ver­sa­tile, and high­ly intel­li­gent” man of let­ters faces writer’s block now and again.

Take the  Rolling Stone think­piece Burgess could­n’t man­age to write in 1973. Con­ced­ing defeat — “things are hell here,” he wrote of his life in Rome at the time — he offered the mag­a­zine “a 50,000-word novel­la I’ve just fin­ished, all about the con­di­tion humaine, etc.” in its place. Sure­ly his edi­tor would under­stand? Alas, unluck­i­ly for Burgess, his edi­tor turned out to be one Hunter S. Thomp­son, who fired back the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly blunt but elo­quent­ly vit­ri­olic reply you see here:

Dear Mr. Burgess, Herr Wen­ner has for­ward­ed your use­less let­ter from Rome to the Nation­al Affairs Desk for my exam­i­na­tion and/or reply. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we have no Inter­na­tion­al Gib­ber­ish Desk, or it would have end­ed up there. What kind of lame, half-mad bull­shit are you try­ing to sneak over on us? When Rolling Stone asks for “a think­piece”, god­damnit, we want a fuck­ing Think­piece… and don’t try to weasel out with any of your limey bull­shit about a “50,000 word novel­la about the con­di­tion humaine, etc…” Do you take us for a gang of brain­less lizards? Rich hood­lums? Dilet­tante thugs? You lazy cock­suck­er. I want that Think­piece on my desk by Labor Day. And I want it ready for press. The time has come & gone when cheap­jack scum like you can get away with the kind of scams you got rich from in the past. Get your worth­less ass out of the piaz­za and back to the type­writer. Your type is a dime a dozen around here, Burgess, and I’m fucked if I’m going to stand for it any longer. Sin­cere­ly, Hunter S Thomp­son

“The desired think­piece nev­er appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone ,” writes the Inter­na­tion­al Antho­ny Burgess Foun­da­tion’s Gra­ham Fos­ter , “but the essay referred to in these let­ters, ‘The Clock­work Con­di­tion’, was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in the New York­er in 2012 .” In it, Burgess recalls the ori­gins of his best-known nov­el and con­sid­ers the caus­es of the soci­etal con­for­mi­ty he took as one of his themes, arriv­ing at the Orwellian notion that “the bur­den of mak­ing one’s own choic­es is, for many peo­ple, intol­er­a­ble. To be tied to the neces­si­ty of decid­ing for one­self is to be a slave to one’s will.”

That goes for “where to eat, whom to vote for, what to wear” — and, of course, for what to write a think­piece about as well as how to write it. “It is eas­i­er to be told ,” Burgess writes. “Smoke Hale — nine­ty per cent less tar; read this nov­el, sev­en­ty-five weeks on the best-sell­er list; don’t see that movie, it’s art­sy-shmart­sy.” He even remem­bers, with a cer­tain fond­ness, his time in the army: “At first I resent­ed the dis­ci­pline, the removal of even min­i­mal lib­er­ty,” but “soon my reduc­tion to a piece of clock­work began to please me, soothe me.” Fair to say, though, that no mat­ter how demand­ing the offi­cers above him, the expe­ri­ence did­n’t pre­pare Burgess for a supe­ri­or like Thomp­son.

via More Let­ters of Note and Esquire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Read 18 Lost Sto­ries From Hunter S. Thompson’s For­got­ten Stint As a For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ball­sy & Hilar­i­ous Job Appli­ca­tion Let­ter (1958)

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son

Based in Seoul,  Col­in Mar­shall  writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les,  A Los Ange­les Primer , the video series  The City in Cin­e­ma ,  the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project  Where Is the City of the Future? , and the  Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog .  Fol­low him on Twit­ter at  @colinmarshall  or on  Face­boo k .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (9) |

Related posts:

Comments (9), 9 comments so far.

As fun­ny and cathar­tic as that was for him truth be told Burgess was ten times the writer Thomp­son ever was.

awsom letter.this was almost too funny.thanks for post­ing it.

Hunter Thomp­son lacks wit and is huge­ly over­rat­ed.

Well, all the world knows, reads and appre­ci­ates Antho­ny Burgess. Who is Hunter S Thomp­son? This says all. Not to men­tion we’re talk­ing about Rolling Stone…

Chris lacks balls and is prob­a­bly a hack.

What a bunch of dis­re­spect­ful, slan­der­ous filth in these com­ments. If his writ­ing is any­thing like clock­work orange, he is in no lit­er­ary sense close to hunter s Thomp­son. You can’t com­pare real life expe­ri­ence to rub­bish fan­ta­sy. Clock­work Orange was a shit­ty movie. I saw it a cou­ple times and I did­n’t enjoy it. It made me think of how delu­sion­al and messed up some­one would have to be to write some­thing like that.

Hunter S Thomp­son pro­vid­ed a per­spec­tive that no one else on this earth has or ever will. That is wor­thy of respect in my books.

I’d like to see these key­board war­riors run with the Hel­l’s Angels like Hunter did.

Real life>Fantasy

Let’s see, you can’t fig­ure out the dif­fer­ence between a book and a movie direc­tor’s vision of that book, you haven’t read any­thing by Burgess, you think rid­ing with the Hel­l’s Angels is some sort of lit­er­ary achieve­ment and you’re angry those who have read both authors don’t agree with your views.

It’s OK to be stu­pid, often it’s not your fault–genetics, envi­ron­ment, etc all play a role–but the secret is not to show your stu­pid­i­ty off to every­one. Give mom­my her lap­top back, you’ll thank me when you grow up.

All kid­ding aside, can some­one please explain why “To be tied to the neces­si­ty of decid­ing for one­self is to be a slave to one’s will.” isn’t com­plete dri­v­el?

It’s because tak­ing deci­sions requires men­tal effort, and entails respon­si­bil­i­ty. You are ful­ly respon­si­ble for your deci­sions, and you have to accept the con­se­quences, includ­ing remorse and won­der­ing about what could have been dif­fer­ent should you have opt­ed for some­thing else. By con­trast, being told what to do is lib­er­at­ing — you don’t have to pon­der over pos­si­ble advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages, loss­es, gains, moral­i­ty. And best of all? No mat­ter the out­come, it’s not your fault. You were sim­ply doing what you had been told.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Fear and Earning

By Lucian K. Truscott Iv

• Feb. 25, 2005

Los Angeles - THE night the news hit that Hunter S. Thompson had committed suicide at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., I drove to my office and read a few of the letters we had exchanged over the years. Hunter was a prolific letter writer. Come to think of it, so was I. So were we all in those days. We had to be. None of us had the money to call long distance.

It's hard today to think of a figure like Hunter Thompson as a struggling writer, but most of his letters in my files were about money and the writing business and (again) money -- what kind of stories the magazines were looking for, what they were paying, who had the fattest expense account. Hunter was always short of money. We all were.

I first met Hunter when I was a lieutenant in the Army at Fort Carson, Colo., in 1969. I had read and admired "Hell's Angels," and when a friend told me he lived in Aspen, I drove up one weekend looking for him. Aspen was a tiny place back then, and it didn't take me long to find him sharing a late afternoon whiskey with a friend who owned a local art gallery. It turned out we had several friends in common, one thing led to another, and we ended up having dinner at his place. After dinner, I overheard an argument he had with his first wife, Sandy, about charging groceries on their credit card. Food was expensive in Aspen, and if they didn't have enough cash, they'd use the card, the last one they had.

The next Friday after work, I bought a couple of bags of groceries at the Fort Carson commissary for less than half of what they would have cost in Aspen and drove up. I arrived at Hunter and Sandy's around midnight, delivered the groceries as thanks for dinner the previous week, and ended up spending the weekend with them. I remember I brought a quart of gin from the fort's liquor store that cost about $2.50. We stayed up late drinking and talking, and when I left on Sunday, there was 2/3 of a bottle left.

We kept up the Fort Carson resupply chain until I finally wore out my welcome with both the Army and the Thompsons and left Colorado for New York. From then on, we stayed in touch by mail. As the letters attest, Hunter was always looking for work -- for someone who would publish him and pay him on a reliable basis.

One night a year or so after I had left Aspen, I was visiting Hunter and Sandy, staying in the guest room across from a basement office he called his "war room." I came back to the house around 1 a.m. and wandered into Hunter's office. He was perched at his I.B.M. Selectric pounding away. I asked him what he was working on. He handed me a stack of pages, kept writing, and I went across the hall to read. When I returned a few minutes later, he asked me what I thought. I told him I thought it was great, and asked what it was. "I don't know," he said. "I'm just going to keep writing until it makes sense."

It was the first chapter of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," the result of two failed writing assignments for other magazines. After it was finally published in Rolling Stone, publishers came calling, Hollywood beckoned, and Hunter's search for a home as a writer was over.

Op-Ed Contributor Lucian K. Truscott IV is a novelist and screenwriter.