New Journalism's Dark Prince
The suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the best-selling writer who pioneered an extravagant form of participatory journalism famously labeled "gonzo," brought to a sober close an era of print journalism rooted in the raucous 1960s.
Unlike other practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, Thompson, who died Sunday, was a full-fledged participant in his stories, which explored the dark recesses of the American dream.
Whether he was running with the Hells Angels to chronicle the biker lifestyle or creating genuine "fear and loathing" by running wild through Las Vegas, he wrote eloquent rants that were fueled not only by alcohol and the most potent hallucinogens of the day, but by the suspicions and sensibilities that undergirded the counterculture movement. He was its fierce and funny bard.
"He was the greatest comic writer in the English language in the 20th century," Tom Wolfe, the icon of literary journalism to whom Thompson was often favorably compared, told The Times on Monday. "He not only wrote about but personified the wild personal freedom that began in the 1960s. He celebrated the druggie madness and soared with it
Gay Talese, another trailblazer of the New Journalism, said Thompson was a writer "of the moment."
"He caught the fact that you could catch something of the [country's] madness that wasn't particularly historically important but was of the moment," Talese told The Times. "He was one of the first writers of the '60s who was part of the literary celebrity culture who did his song and dance not to any particular rhythm but his own."
Thompson took pride in being the wild man of American journalism.
"As a journalist, I somehow managed to break most of the rules and still succeed," he told biographer William McKeen. "It's a hard thing for most of today's journeymen journalists to understand, but only because they can't do it."
Thompson, who was caricatured by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in the comic strip "Doonesbury" as the sleazy Uncle Duke and portrayed in movies by Johnny Depp and Bill Murray, died of a gunshot wound to the head at his 100-acre farm outside Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.
Joe di Salvo, director of investigations for the Pitkin County, Colo., Sheriff's Department, said Monday that officials had no information on what might have led the writer to take his own life. Friends of Thompson said he had been in pain from back surgery and an artificial hip, but that they had observed no dramatic change in his behavior in the days before he killed himself.
