Hunter S. Thompson – A Rebel Among Society

This man was a writer and a journalist who lived from 1937 to 2005 (death via suicide). He was an American author and a journalist. He was born to a middle-class family in Kentucky. He had a tough childhood. His father died early and left the family poor. He was not able to complete his high school education because he was put in jail for sixty days after helping with a robbery. After this he joined the Air Force and then moved into journalism, spending some time in Aspen, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and California in the 1960s.

He became very well known in the international writing scene after he published a memoir after he spent time with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang in 1967. He spent a year with them both living and riding and he spent that time listening to their stories first hand and experiencing their lives. Before that, he was actually a somewhat conservative journalist but quickly he became branded some sort of counter cultural figure with a new style of Journalism that he titled Gonzo. This was a style of journalism where the reporters would embed themselves into their own stories to such a degree that they ended up becoming the central characters themselves. He remains best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was a discussion on the failure of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

He was politically minded and he failed during a brief stint trying to run for the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. This was during the year 1970 and he ran on the Freak Power ticket. He was well known for hatred of Richard Nixon, which he tried to claim he a very dark side and was the violent side of the American model. Thompson had a notably declining output throughout the mid 1970s as he dealt with the struggles of becoming famous. He said he couldn’t report on events as he wanted to simply because he was being recognized too easily. He was well known for using alcohol and drugs through his life. He also had a contempt for authority and a love for firearms.

He was suffering from health problems at the time of his death. He killed himself at the age of 67. As his wishes stated, his ashes were shot out of a cannon in a ceremony that Johnny Depp paid for and a lot of his friends ended up attending including Jack Nicholson and John Kerry. Hari Kunzru wrote that his true voice was that of a moralist who makes himself ugly simply to expose the ugliness of what is going on around him.