The liquor stores will be facing a run of Wild Turkey bourbon this week as Hunter S. Thompson fans around the country enjoy a drink in honor of the renowned writer and drug abuser's death this week.
Thompson, the creator of gonzo journalism, which incorporates rambling first-person diatribes into typically dry narratives, passed away on Sunday from a self-inflicted gunshot at the age of 65. Best known for his 1971 work, the raucously funny and psychedelic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Thompson pushed for journalism to lose its nature of objectivity and instead revel in a subjective narrator who doesn't just report, but becomes a character in the story.
The news of his death was a kick to the gut to those who have followed Thompson's life over the years. The author's prose leapt off the page; once you picked up one of his books, it was nearly impossible to set it down until the last page had been devoured.
But now the man is dead, gone the same exact way as Ernest Hemmingway before him. The similarities between the two men are telling. Both invented their own personae, creating a character for the public which they maintained. And both ended their lives with a gun to their head.
Perhaps beneath the defiant exterior lay a deeply sad soul, one whose deep-seated idealism presented a continual moral and ethical crisis. Thompson was always attracted to the concept and failure of the American Dream, the idea that "anything is possible" is merely a myth which was never realized in modern America.
In his 20s and living in New York, Thompson fell in love with the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," the ultimate story of the death of the American Dream, rewriting the text three times by typewriter in order to get a sense of the other author's prose.
He started as a normal journalist, becoming involved with newspapers while working as the editor of an Air Force base publication. Honorably discharged from the Air Force (in many of his books he would publish his discharge notice), he bounced around a variety of newspaper jobs in sports and news around the East Coast, later working for a sports magazine in Puerto Rico, before eventually becoming a stringer for the National Observer in South America.
He became a writer for The Nation while living in California in the 1960s with his new wife, mainly writing book reviews while continuing his attempt to write the "great American novel."
The first book he had published was "Hell's Angels," an in-depth look at the infamous biker gang in California, originally commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine.
His political writings shaped a generation of politics, creating Rolling Stone's National Affairs desk. Later, Thompson followed George McGovern's campaign against Richard Nixon for the magazine, later turning the pieces into a book, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail."
For a man who was attracted to the idea of mythmaking, he himself was an expert at it. He surrounded himself with layers of hyperbole and overkill, and he quickly garnered an image of a man who lives life with no regard for anyone or anything, a living example of drug abuse and irresponsibility.
His letters, which he published in three volumes, show a man who is quick to accuse and slander. But to his friends, girlfriends, and mother, Thompson was someone who had a tenderness and insecurity about his ability to become the next great American author.
And in that goal, you could say he failed. He only published one true novel in his lifetime, "The Rum Diary;" a critical failure which spent 40 years in his closet, unpublished, only to be placed on bookshelves in the 1990s at the urging of his publisher.
Despite never writing a truly critically acclaimed work, the man was famous in his own right, as much for his character as for his writing. But he never achieved the great potential of which his letters hinted.
As Thompson's most famous narrator Raoul Duke said in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "We'd be fools to not ride this strange torpedo right to the end." Those who fell in love with Thompson's writings about drink, drugs and rebellion would be forced to agree that the author did all he could to stay on that torpedo as long as he could.
