Hunter S. Thompson

• 1. Introduction

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  Hunter S. Thompson once wrote a line he repeated for the rest of his life. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." That sentence, equal parts confession and dare, fits the man who lived a year riding with the Hells Angels and serialized a drug-soaked road trip in Rolling Stone. He was born on the 18th of July 1937 and died on the 20th of February 2005, an American journalist who refused to call himself a reporter. Along the way he invented a style of writing he named Gonzo, ran for sheriff with a shaved head, and turned his own appetites into a national act. How does a copy boy fired from Time become a cult figure played three times on movie screens? What does it cost a writer to become his own fictional character? And why would a man plan, decades ahead, to have his ashes fired from a cannon? The answers run through motorcycle gangs, presidential campaigns, and a fortified compound in the Colorado mountains.

• 2. Riding With Outlaws

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  In 1965, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, hired Thompson to write about the Hells Angels motorcycle club in California. Thompson was living near San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, where the Angels lived across from the Grateful Dead. His article appeared on the 17th of May 1965, and book offers followed almost at once. He then spent the next year living and riding with the club to write a first-hand account of their lives. That intimacy curdled. The bikers came to believe Thompson was exploiting them for profit and demanded a cut. An argument at a party turned into what the Angels called a "stomping", a savage beating Thompson took after he stepped in to protect a dog and a woman from a punk. Random House published Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966, and the brawl became part of the marketing. CBC Television even staged a face-off between Thompson and Angel Skip Workman before a live studio audience. One New York Times review called the book "angry, knowledgeable, fascinating, and excitedly written", and praised a writer whose "prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust". Thompson later advised photographer Danny Lyon never to join the Outlaws Motorcycle Club unless "it was absolutely necessary for photo action".

• 3. Inventing Gonzo

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  In 1970, editor Warren Hinckle paired Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman for a piece in the short-lived magazine Scanlan's Monthly. The assignment was the Kentucky Derby. Thompson nearly ignored the race itself and wrote instead about the drunken revelry around it in his hometown, against a backdrop of Nixon's bombing of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State two days later. The manic first-person voice came from desperation. Facing a deadline, Thompson started ripping pages straight from his notebook and sending them in. Journalist Bill Cardoso, who had met Thompson on a press bus during the 1968 New Hampshire primary, read the result and wrote back. "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." According to Steadman, Thompson seized the word immediately and said, "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo." The style put the writer at the center of the story as a participant, then mixed in invented, metaphoric elements until the line between fact and fiction blurred on purpose. Thompson's own first printed use of the word came later, in a passage that runs: "The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism."

• 4. The Vegas Book

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  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began with a death. Thompson was researching "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan", a Rolling Stone exposé on the 1970 killing of Mexican-American television journalist Ruben Salazar, shot in the head at close range with a tear-gas canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy. One source was activist and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta. Finding Los Angeles too tense to talk freely, the two went to Las Vegas, using a Sports Illustrated assignment to write a 250-word caption on the Mint 400 motorcycle race. The caption escaped its cage. Thompson sent Sports Illustrated a 2,500-word manuscript that was, in his words, "aggressively rejected". Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner liked the first jangled pages, called the thing "Sharp and insane", and gave him the push to finish. Serialized in two parts in November 1971 and published as a book the next year, it is narrated by Raoul Duke and his "300-pound Samoan attorney". The pair chase the American Dream loaded with "two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid" and far more. A New York Times reviewer called it "the best book yet written on the decade of dope". It was adapted for film loosely in 1980 as Where the Buffalo Roam and explicitly in 1998.

• 5. On The Campaign Trail

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  Wenner agreed in 1971 to send Thompson after the 1972 presidential election for Rolling Stone, paying a retainer of $1,000 a month and renting him a house near Washington's Rock Creek Park. Part of the logic was a new electorate. The 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, putting the magazine's young readers in play. Thompson favored Senator George McGovern and wrote scathing coverage of his rivals, including early leader Senator Edmund Muskie. In one installment he spread a rumor, which he later admitted inventing, that Muskie had become addicted to the drug ibogaine. The story dented Muskie's standing and helped cost him the nomination. The work was collected as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 in early 1973. McGovern's campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the "most accurate and least factual" account of the race. Thompson even wrote that Mankiewicz had leapt from behind a bush to attack him with a hammer, an invented scene that left readers unsure where reporting ended. As biographer William McKeen put it, "He wrote for his own amusement, and if others came along for the ride, that was all right."

• 6. Freak Power

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  Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in 1970 on the "Freak Power" ticket. The platform was a provocation in itself. He proposed decriminalizing drugs for personal use, tearing up the streets for grassy pedestrian malls, banning buildings tall enough to block the mountains, disarming the police, and renaming Aspen "Fat City" to scare off investors. Having shaved his own head, he called his crew-cut Republican rival "my long-haired opponent". With polls showing a slight lead, Thompson walked into Rolling Stone's San Francisco headquarters with a six-pack and told Wenner he was about to be elected. His resulting feature, "The Battle of Aspen", carried the byline "By: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Candidate for Sheriff)", the title pulled from a mail-order church. He lost. He carried the city of Aspen but took only 44% of the county-wide vote, and later said the article drew more opposition than support. He named his nearby home "Owl Farm", a 110-acre property that cost him $75,000, bought with paperback royalties from Hell's Angels. He called it his "fortified compound" and lived there the rest of his life. The campaign became the 2020 documentary Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb.

• 7. When The Work Stopped

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  Thompson's journalism started to fail him after a 1974 trip to Kinshasa, Zaire, to cover the Rumble in the Jungle between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. He missed the fight, intoxicated at his hotel, and filed nothing. As Wenner later told Roger Ebert, "After Africa, he just couldn't write. He couldn't piece it together." In 1973 he tried cocaine for the first time, and friends and editors described its effect on his output as devastating. Sent to Saigon in 1975 as South Vietnam collapsed, he obsessed over evacuation plans, refused to file, and flew to Bangkok. From Thailand he sent back not a story but a custom brass plaque reading "Rolling Stone: Global Affairs Suite. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson". "That was it," Wenner wrote. "No story. Just that plaque." Most of his later output appeared in a four-volume series called The Gonzo Papers, from The Great Shark Hunt in 1979 to Better Than Sex in 1994. In the late 1980s he worked as a media columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, where editor David McCumber said, "One week it would be acid-soaked gibberish with a charm of its own. The next week it would be incisive political analysis of the highest order." Wenner kept him on the masthead as chief of the "National Affairs Desk" until the end.

• 8. The Last Wish

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  At 5:42 pm on the 20th of February 2005, Thompson shot himself at Owl Farm at the age of 67. His son Juan, daughter-in-law Jennifer, and grandson were visiting that weekend. His wife Anita, calling from the Aspen Club, mistook the cocking of the gun for his typewriter keys and hung up just before he fired. In his typewriter was a page bearing the date "Feb. 22 '05" and a single word, "counselor". Rolling Stone later published a note titled "Football Season Is Over", in which he wrote, "67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted." Ralph Steadman recalled being told 25 years earlier that Thompson would feel trapped without knowing he could end things at any moment. On the 20th of August 2005, in a private funeral, his ashes were fired from a cannon set atop a 153-foot tower shaped like a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button, the symbol from his sheriff campaign. The $3 million send-off was funded by Johnny Depp, who said, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true." An estimated 280 people attended, among them Steadman and Senators John Kerry and George McGovern. In September 2025 the Colorado Bureau of Investigation reopened the case, and on the 23rd of January 2026 concluded there was no evidence the death was anything other than suicide.