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Probably no other twentieth-century author seemed so inseparable from his own stories as Hunter S. Thompson. His best-known book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is a landmark, defining work. Like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it peers into the best and worst mysteries of the American heart. But Fear and Loathing is also the story of the sort of life Hunter Thompson lived. The drugs and drink should have killed him, the anger should have worn him down, and maybe in the end, it all contributed to how he died that night in February. But Thompson never regretted how he lived. It was essential to how he did the work that he did. In a dark time, he sought to understand how the American dream had turned a gun on itself. Nobody in modern literature has come closer to answering that question, and perhaps Thompson came closer than anybody should. He would have had it no other way. He never flinched, even in his last moments.
Thompson began his writing career in the Air Force, in 1957. Not yet twenty-one, he was already looking to test his limits -- not to mention the limits of just about everybody he would write for. He'd enlisted because a judge in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, ordered him to -- Thompson had run into some serious legal trouble just days before his high school graduation. At Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Thompson wrangled his way into a job as a sports editor, and set about pissing everybody off. One night, he remade the camp's newspaper at the last minute, inserting a front-page story that exposed an improper discharge the base had granted a star football player to help his professional career. His commanders were livid. One officer noted, "[This] airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy or personal advice and guidance. Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members. He has little consideration for military bearing or dress and seems to dislike the service and want out as soon as possible." The newspaper's editor, a master sergeant, arranged for Thompson's honorable discharge in the fall of 1957. Hunter filed a final story, describing a drunken nighttime riot at Eglin Base, resulting in the explosions of airplanes and the rape of female cadets -- none of which ever happened.
Thompson soon took a job at a small newspaper in Pennsylvania. But it didn't last long; he fled after wrecking an editor's car. He ran as far as New York, where he landed a job as a copy boy at Time magazine. In his off time, he was reading the Beat authors and poets: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso. He revered Kerouac above all -- his work was all about freedom of the self in a convention-bound society. The message reverberated with Thompson: He was beginning to chafe at his Time job, and when he demanded that the magazine make him a reporter, his editors booted him. He pushed his limits more, staying up nights drinking and writing a novel, Prince Jellyfish. He finished a first draft in early 1959, but he knew it wasn't working. That same year, he met Sandy Dawn -- his first serious girlfriend. He took a job at a sports magazine in Puerto Rico, brought Sandy down there with him, but ended up writing for the magazine as little as possible when he found out he'd mainly be covering bowlers. For the next few years, he moved around a lot -- sometimes with Sandy (he would marry her in 1963, succumbing to his mother's pressure), sometimes without her, frequently taking his frustration out on her in unkind ways, and seeing other women when the desire and opportunity meshed. He grew angry at not getting published. He started getting into guns -- shooting at bottles, beat-up cars and other big and noisy items. It became one of his life's favorite pastimes.
In 1962, he started writing for the National Observer -- then the most adventurous newspaper in America. He filed several stories from South America. Some of them seemed so strange as to have been made up (the editors could never verify the articles' accuracy), though others -- stories of poverty and abuses of life and justice in places like Brazil -- felt frighteningly accurate. While he was in South America, something central happened to Thompson's development as a writer: He began taking drugs. He'd developed dysentery, which meant he couldn't drink alcohol as much as he liked, and so he started to ingest various stimulants -- including coca leaves and amphetamines. He used the stuff so much, his hair fell out during his time there. Thompson eventually determined that the right drugs, in balance with the right amounts of alcohol, would help him churn out an increasingly prodigious -- and for a time, an amazingly inspired -- amount of writing.
Thompson left the National Observer in 1964, and he and Sandy moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where a young community -- drawn together largely by the city's burgeoning and inventive rock & roll scene -- was coalescing around daring new sets of ideals regarding drug use, sexual relationships and opposition to America's increasingly deadly involvement in Vietnam. Thompson sympathized, but he thought the idealism was too naive and vulnerable to all manner of dangers and disenchantment. In 1965, he wrote an article for The Nation about the Bay Area's other outsider community, the Hell's Angels. These were lost men, fuck-ups who had no hopes and who found meaning and comfort in their hard-bitten solidarity -- but they also, Thompson believed, signified a new breed of dangerous subculture that America hadn't seen before. Thompson later expanded the article into a full-length book. Frightening but riveting, Hell's Angels was Thompson's first major work. "His language is brilliant," said the New York Times Book Review, "his eye is remarkable, and his point of view is reminiscent of Huck Finn's. He'll look at anything; he won't compromise his integrity. Somehow his exuberance and innocence are unaffected by what he sees."
(Excerpted from RS 970, March 24, 2005)