Age, Biography, and Wiki
Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He passed away on February 20, 2005, at the age of 67. Thompson's life was marked by his unique blend of journalism and fiction, which often blurred the lines between reality and fiction. His most famous works include "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Hell's Angels," which catapulted him to fame.
| Occupation | Journalist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 18 July 1937 |
| Age | 87 Years |
| Birth Place | Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Cancer |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 20 February, 2005 |
| Died Place | Woody Creek, Colorado, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited information available about Hunter S. Thompson's height and weight. However, he was known for his distinctive appearance, often sporting sunglasses and a hat, which became a part of his public persona.
Discerning the line between the fact and fiction of Thompson's work presented a practical problem for editors and fact-checkers. Love called fact-checking Thompson's work "one of the sketchiest occupations ever created in the publishing world", and "for the first-timer ... a trip through a journalistic fun house, where you didn't know what was real and what wasn't. You knew you had better learn enough about the subject at hand to know when the riff began and reality ended. Hunter was a stickler for numbers, for details like gross weight and model numbers, for lyrics and caliber, and there was no faking it."
| Height | |
| Weight | |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Thompson was married twice, first to Sandra Dawn and then to Anita Bejmuk. He had one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, from his first marriage.
His parents were introduced by a friend from Jack's fraternity at the University of Kentucky in September 1934, and married on November 2, 1935. Journalist Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian stated that Thompson's first name, Hunter, came from an ancestor on his mother's side, Scottish surgeon John Hunter. A more direct attribution is that Thompson's first and middle name, Hunter Stockton, came from his maternal grandparents, Prestly Stockton Ray and Lucille Hunter.
In December 1943, when Thompson was six years old, the family settled in the affluent Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of The Highlands. On July 3, 1952, when Thompson was 14, his father died of myasthenia gravis at age 58. Hunter and his brothers were raised by their mother. Virginia worked as a librarian to support her children and was described as a "heavy drinker" following her husband's death.
In May 1962, Thompson traveled to South America for a year as a correspondent for the Dow Jones-owned weekly paper, the National Observer. In Brazil, he spent several months as a reporter for the Rio de Janeiro-based Brazil Herald, the country's only English-language daily. His longtime girlfriend, Sandra Dawn Conklin (subsequently Sondi Wright), joined him in Rio. They married on May 19, 1963, shortly after returning to the United States, and lived briefly in Aspen, Colorado. Sandy was eight-months-pregnant when they relocated to Glen Ellen, California. During the summer of that same year, Hunter began taking dextroamphetamine, which is what he would predominantly use for writing until around 1974, when he began to write mostly under the influence of cocaine.
In 1965, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, hired Thompson to write a story about the Hells Angels motorcycle club in California. At the time, Thompson was living in a house near San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where the Hells Angels lived across from the Grateful Dead. His article appeared on May 17, 1965, after which he received several book offers and spent the next year living and riding with the club. The relationship broke down when the bikers perceived that Thompson was exploiting them for personal gain and demanded a share of his profits. An argument at a party resulted in Thompson suffering a savage beating (or "stomping", as the Angels referred to it) when Thompson intervened to protect a dog and a woman from physical abuse by a punk. Random House published the hard cover Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966, and the fight between Thompson and the Angels was well-marketed. CBC Television even broadcast an encounter between Thompson and Hells Angel Skip Workman before a live studio audience.
In 1975, Wenner assigned Thompson to travel to Vietnam to cover what appeared to be the end of the Vietnam War. Thompson arrived in Saigon just as South Vietnam was collapsing and as other journalists were leaving the country. Wenner allegedly canceled Thompson's medical insurance, which strained Thompson's relationship with Rolling Stone. He soon fled the country and refused to file his report until the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Wenner, writing in 2022, denied the claims that he canceled Thompson's insurance, saying that Thompson spent most of his time in Saigon obsessing over evacuation plans. Thompson filed an unfinished dispatch that Wenner described "strong and promising, but nothing substantial." He then took a commercial flight to Bangkok, where he met his wife for what Wenner described as a few weeks of "totally undeserved rest and recreation." While in Thailand, Thompson had a custom brass door plaque made that read "Rolling Stone: Global Affairs Suite. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" marked with a map of the world and two lightning bolts. "That was it," Wenner wrote. "No story. Just that plaque." Thompson later finished the story in time for the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
In 1980, Thompson divorced his wife, Sandra Conklin. The same year marked the release of Where the Buffalo Roam, a loose film adaptation based on Thompson's early 1970s work, starring Bill Murray as the writer. Murray eventually became one of Thompson's trusted friends. Later that year, Thompson relocated to Hawaii to research and write The Curse of Lono, a Gonzo-style account of the 1980 Honolulu Marathon. Extensively illustrated by Ralph Steadman, an iteration of the work first appeared in Running in 1981 as "The Charge of the Weird Brigade" and was later excerpted in Playboy in 1983. The book was a disappointment, with its editor calling it "disorganized and incoherent." It was poorly reviewed, and sales were disappointing.
At 5:42 pm on February 20, 2005, Thompson died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at Owl Farm, his "fortified compound" in Woody Creek, Colorado. His son Juan, daughter-in-law Jennifer, and grandson were visiting for the weekend. His wife Anita, who was at the Aspen Club, was on the phone with him as he cocked the gun. According to the Aspen Daily News, Thompson asked her to come home to help him write his ESPN column, then set the receiver on the counter. Anita said she mistook the cocking of the gun for the sound of his typewriter keys and hung up as he fired. Will, his grandson, and Jennifer were in the next room when they heard the gunshot, but mistook the sound for a book falling and did not check on Thompson immediately. Juan Thompson found his father's body. According to the police report and Anita's cell phone records, he called the sheriff's office half an hour later, then walked outside and fired three shotgun blasts into the air to "mark the passing of his father." The police report stated that in Thompson's typewriter was a piece of paper with the date "Feb. 22 '05" and a single word, "counselor".
Years of alcohol and cocaine abuse contributed to his problem with depression. Thompson's inner circle told the press that he had been depressed and always found February a "gloomy" month, with football season over and the harsh Colorado winter weather. He was also upset over his advancing age and chronic medical problems, including a hip replacement; he would frequently mutter, "This kid is getting old." Rolling Stone published what Douglas Brinkley described as a suicide note written by Thompson to his wife, titled "Football Season Is Over." It read:
| Parents | |
| Husband | Sandra Conklin (m. 1963-1980) Anita Bejmuk (m. 2003) |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death, Hunter S. Thompson's net worth was estimated to be around $5 million. His income primarily came from his writing, including book sales and contributions to various publications. The value of his estate has likely increased over time due to the enduring popularity of his works, but this increase is not directly quantifiable as he passed away in 2005.
Thompson often used a blend of fiction and fact when portraying himself in his writing, too, sometimes using the name Raoul Duke as an author surrogate, whom he generally described as a callous, erratic, self-destructive journalist, constantly drinking and taking hallucinogens. In the early 1980s, Wenner spoke with Thompson about his alcoholism and addiction to cocaine, and offered to pay for drug treatment. "Hunter was polite and firm;" Wenner wrote in 2022. "He had thought about it and didn't feel he could or would change. He felt that [his drug abuse] was a key to his talent. He said that if he didn't do drugs, he would have the mind of an accountant. The abuse was already taking a toll on his gifts.... It was just too late, and he knew it."
Thompson's widow established two scholarship funds at Columbia University School of General Studies for U.S. military veterans and the University of Kentucky for journalism students. Colorado NORML created the Hunter S. Thompson Scholarship to pay all expenses for a lawyer or law student to attend the NORML Legal Committee Conference in Aspen, generally the first few days of June each year. The funding from a silent auction has paid for two winners for some years. Many winners have gone on to become important cannabis lawyers on state and national levels.
Career, Business, and Investments
Hunter S. Thompson was a pioneering figure in the field of journalism, famously known for founding the gonzo journalism movement. His career began with a series of articles about the Hell's Angels motorcycle club, which led to his first book, "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs," published in 1966. This book was highly acclaimed and launched his career.
Thompson's most renowned work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," was published in 1971. The book's success led to two film adaptations, further boosting his fame and wealth.
Thompson completed basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas and transferred to Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois to study electronics. He applied to become an aviator, but the Air Force's aviation-cadet program rejected his application. In 1956, he transferred to Eglin Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. While serving at Eglin, he took evening classes at Florida State University. At Eglin, he landed his first professional writing job as sports editor of the Command Courier by lying about his job experience. As sports editor, Thompson traveled around the United States with the Eglin Eagles football team, covering its games. In early 1957, he wrote a sports column for The Playground News, a local newspaper in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. His name did not appear on the column because Air Force regulations forbade outside employment.
After leaving the Air Force, Thompson worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, before relocating to New York City. There, he audited several courses at the Columbia University School of General Studies. During this time, he worked briefly for Time as a copy boy for $51 a week. At work, he typed out parts of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms to learn the authors' rhythms and writing styles. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination. Later that year, he worked as a reporter for The Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York. He was fired from this job after damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant, who happened to be an advertiser with the paper.
In 1960, Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with the sporting magazine El Sportivo, which ceased operations soon after his arrival. Thompson applied for a job with the Puerto Rican English-language daily The San Juan Star, but its managing editor, future novelist William J. Kennedy, turned him down. Nonetheless, the two became friends. After the demise of El Sportivo, Thompson worked as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune and a few other stateside papers on Caribbean issues, with Kennedy working as his editor.
In 1967, shortly before the Summer of Love, Thompson wrote "The 'Hashbury' is the Capital of the Hippies" for The New York Times Magazine. He criticized San Francisco's hippies as devoid of both the political convictions of the New Left and the artistic core of the Beats, resulting in a culture overrun with young people who spent their time in the pursuit of drugs. "The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or 'revolution', but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been – perhaps should have been – and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms," he wrote.
The first use of the word "Gonzo" to describe Thompson's work is credited to journalist Bill Cardoso, who first met Thompson on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968 New Hampshire primary. In 1970, Cardoso (who was then the editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine) wrote to Thompson praising the "Kentucky Derby" piece as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." According to Steadman, Thompson took to the word right away and said, "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo." Thompson's first published use of the word appears in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: "Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism."
Starting around 1980, Thompson became less active by his standards. Aside from paid appearances, he largely retreated to his compound in Woody Creek, rejecting projects and assignments or failing to complete them. Despite a lack of new material, Wenner kept Thompson on the Rolling Stone masthead as chief of the "National Affairs Desk", a position he held until his death.
Thompson next accepted a role as weekly media columnist and critic for The San Francisco Examiner. The position was arranged by former editor and fellow Examiner columnist Warren Hinckle. As his editor at The Examiner, David McCumber described, "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."
Thompson finished his journalism career in the same way it had begun, writing about sports. From 2000 until his death in 2005, he wrote a weekly column for ESPN.com's Page 2 entitled "Hey, Rube". In 2004, Simon & Schuster collected some of the columns from the first few years and released them in mid-2004 as Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.
In a 1965 letter to his friend Paul Semonin, Thompson explained an affection for the Industrial Workers of the World, "I have in recent months come to have a certain feeling for Joe Hill and the Wobbly crowd who, if nothing else, had the right idea. But not the right mechanics. I believe the IWW was probably the last human concept in American politics." In another letter to Semonin, Thompson wrote that he agreed with Karl Marx, and compared him to Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to William Kennedy, Thompson confided that he was "coming to view the free enterprise system as the single greatest evil in the history of human savagery." In the documentary Breakfast with Hunter, Thompson is seen in several scenes wearing different Che Guevara T-shirts. Additionally, actor and friend Benicio del Toro has stated that Thompson kept a "big" picture of Che in his kitchen. Thompson wrote on behalf of African-American rights and the civil rights movement. He strongly criticized the dominance in American society of what he called "white power structures".
* Eric C. Shoaf donated a cache of approximately 800 items (in librarian terms, about 35–40 linear feet of material on a shelf) pertaining to the life and career of Thompson to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Shoaf also published a descriptive bibliography, Gonzology: A Hunter Thompson Bibliography, of the works of Hunter S. Thompson with over 1,000 entries, many never before documented appearances in print, hundreds of biographical entries about Thompson's life, full descriptions of all his primary works, preface by William McKeen, Phd, and photo section with rare and exclusive items depicted.
Social Network
As Thompson passed away in 2005, he did not have an active social media presence. However, his work and legacy continue to inspire many, and there are numerous profiles and fan pages dedicated to him on platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, regarded as one of the principal pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe. He rose to prominence with the publication of Hell's Angels (1967), a book for which he spent a year living with the Hells Angels motorcycle club to write a first-hand account of their lives and experiences. In 1970, he wrote an unconventional article titled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" for Scanlan's Monthly, which further raised his profile as a countercultural figure. It also set him on the path to establishing his own subgenre of New Journalism that he called "Gonzo", a journalistic style in which the writer becomes a central figure and participant in the events of the narrative.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Thompson's output declined, as he struggled with the consequences of fame and substance abuse, and failed to complete several high-profile assignments for Rolling Stone. For much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he worked as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Most of his work from 1979 to 1994 was collected in The Gonzo Papers. He continued to write sporadically for various outlets, including Rolling Stone, Playboy, Esquire, and ESPN.com until the end of his life.
After returning to mainland United States in 1961, Thompson visited San Francisco and eventually lived in Big Sur, where he spent eight months as security guard and caretaker at Slates Hot Springs, just before it became the Esalen Institute. At the time, Big Sur was a Beat outpost and home of Henry Miller and the screenwriter Dennis Murphy, both of whom Thompson admired. During this period, he published his first magazine feature in Rogue about the artisan and bohemian culture of Big Sur and worked on The Rum Diary. He managed to publish one short story, "Burial at Sea", which also appeared in Rogue. It was his first piece of published fiction. The Rum Diary, based on Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico, was finally published in 1998 and in 2011 was adapted as a motion picture. Paul Perry notes that Thompson exhibited extreme homophobia while at Big Sur, making violent threats to expel gay bathers from local hot springs.
Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects during the early '60s. One story told of his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway's suicide. While there, he stole a pair of elk antlers hanging above the front door of Hemingway's cabin. Later that year, Thompson moved to San Francisco, where he attended the 1964 GOP Convention at the Cow Palace. Thompson severed his ties with the Observer after his editor refused to print his review of Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. He later immersed himself in the drug and hippie culture taking root in the area, and soon began writing for the Berkeley underground paper Spider.
A New York Times review praised the work as an "angry, knowledgeable, fascinating, and excitedly written book", that shows the Hells Angels "not so much as dropouts from society, but as total misfits, or unfits—emotionally, intellectually, and educationally unfit to achieve the rewards, such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers". The reviewer also praised Thompson as a "spirited, witty, observant, and original writer; his prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust".
Also in 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" for the short-lived New Journalism magazine Scanlan's Monthly. For that article, editor Warren Hinckle paired Thompson with illustrator Ralph Steadman, who drew expressionist illustrations with lipstick and eyeliner. Thompson's story virtually ignored the race and focused, instead, on the drunken revelry surrounding the annual event in his hometown. Writing in the first person, he sets the debauchery against the backdrop of the American political scene of the moment: President Richard Nixon had ordered bombing of Cambodia and four students had been killed by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State University, in a massacre, which occurred only two days later.
Thompson and Steadman collaborated regularly after that. Although it was not widely read, the article was the first to use the techniques of Gonzo journalism, a style Thompson later employed in almost every literary endeavor. The manic first-person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of sheer desperation; he was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook.
The book for which Thompson gained most of his fame began during the research for "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," an exposé for Rolling Stone on the 1970 killing of the Mexican-American television journalist Rubén Salazar. Salazar had been shot in the head at close range with a tear-gas canister fired by officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. One of Thompson's sources for the story was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Mexican-American activist and attorney. Finding it difficult to talk in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, Thompson and Acosta decided to travel to Las Vegas, and take advantage of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word photograph caption on the Mint 400 motorcycle race held there.
To develop the story, Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to attend a drug-enforcement conference. The two trips became the basis for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", which Rolling Stone serialized in two parts in November 1971. Random House published a book version the following year. It is written as a first-person account by a journalist named Raoul Duke with Dr. Gonzo, his "300-pound Samoan attorney", During the trip, Duke and his companion (always referred to as "my attorney") become sidetracked by a search for the American Dream, with "two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls."
In 1971, Wenner agreed to assign Thompson to cover the 1972 United States presidential election for Rolling Stone. Thompson was paid a retainer of $1,000 per month and rented a house near Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, at the magazine's expense. He was also given a deal to publish a book on the campaign after its conclusion, which subsequently appeared as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 in early 1973. Insider books on presidential politics had become popular during the prior decade starting with Theodore H. White's Making of the President series, the first of which appeared in 1961, with additional volumes in 1965 and 1969. Their success raised the overall profile of journalists assigned to cover the quadrennial presidential election in the U.S., and it became a common phrase among them to say they were "...Doing a Teddy White," meaning they planned to write their own insider book on the campaign.
In the April 13 installment entitled Fear and Loathing: The Banshee Screams in Florida, Thompson relates how someone having apparently lifted his press credential, and terrorized Muskie and his staff on a campaign train. The incident was later revealed to be an elaborate prank. In another installment, Thompson relates rumors — which he later admitted he had originated — that Muskie had become addicted to the psychoactive drug ibogaine. The story damaged Muskie's reputation and played a role in his loss of the nomination to McGovern. In another, he tracked down McGovern in a restroom to get a reaction quote after a senator from Iowa had switched his endorsement from McGovern to Muskie.
Thompson's journalistic work began to seriously suffer after his trip to Zaire, Africa to cover the Rumble in the Jungle—the world heavyweight boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali—in 1974. He missed the match while intoxicated at his hotel and did not submit a story to the magazine. As Wenner put it to film critic Roger Ebert in the 2008 documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "After Africa, he just couldn't write. He couldn't piece it together". In 1973, Thompson tried cocaine for the first time and various friends, family members, and editors remarked that its impact upon his productivity and creativity was devastating.
Plans for Thompson to cover the 1976 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone and later publish a book fell through as Wenner dissolved Straight Arrow Press's book-publishing division. Thompson claimed Wenner canceled the project without informing him. In his memoirs, Wenner told a different story: "The issue wasn't money ... The real issue was whether he had the discipline to spend so much time on the campaign trail and whether he had that much to say about the same subject again." Thompson went on to spend a day with Jimmy Carter at the Georgia Governor's Mansion and write a 10,000-word cover story endorsing Carter for president. "After that, we were virtually an official part of the Carter campaign, and they treated us as such," Wenner wrote of the episode.
In 1983, he covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada, but did not write or discuss the experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear in 2003. Also in 1983, at the behest of Terry McDonell, he wrote "A Dog Took My Place", an exposé for Rolling Stone of the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce case and what he called the "Palm Beach lifestyle". The story included dubious insinuations of bestiality. Wenner described it as one of Thompson's "least-known but best pieces." In 1985, Thompson accepted an advance to write about "feminist pornography" for Playboy. As part of his research, he spent evenings at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre striptease club in San Francisco. The experience evolved into an as-yet-unpublished novel tentatively entitled The Night Manager.
Thompson is often credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of writing that blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. His work and style are considered to be a major part of the New Journalism literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to break free from the purely objective style of mainstream reporting of the time. Thompson almost always wrote in the first person, while extensively using his own experiences and emotions to color "the story" he was trying to follow.
Despite him having personally described his work as "Gonzo", it fell to later observers to articulate what the phrase actually meant. While Thompson's approach clearly involved injecting himself as a participant in the events of the narrative, it also involved adding invented, metaphoric elements, thus creating, for the uninitiated reader, a seemingly confusing amalgam of facts and fiction notable for the deliberately blurred lines between one and the other. Thompson, in a 1974 interview in Playboy, addressed the issue himself, saying, "Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They're both much better reporters than I am, but then, I don't think of myself as a reporter." Tom Wolfe later described Thompson's style as "... part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric." Or as one description of the differences between Thompson and Wolfe's styles would elaborate, "While Tom Wolfe mastered the technique of being a fly on the wall, Thompson mastered the art of being a fly in the ointment."
Wenner said Thompson tended to work "in long bursts of energy, awake until dawn, or too often, two dawns." He said keeping Thompson on track when finishing a piece required "...companionship, or what editors call hand-holding, but in Hunter's case it was more like being a junior officer in his war. He required his creature comforts, which meant the right kind of typewriter and a certain color paper, Wild Turkey, the right drugs, and the proper music."
Robert Love, Thompson's editor of 23 years at Rolling Stone, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that "the dividing line between fact and fancy rarely blurred, and we didn't always use italics or some other typographical device to indicate the lurch into the fabulous. But if there were living, identifiable humans in a scene, we took certain steps ... Hunter was a close friend of many prominent Democrats, veterans of the 10 or more presidential campaigns he covered, so when in doubt, we'd call the press secretary. 'People will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,' he once said, and he was right."
After the September 11 attacks, Thompson voiced skepticism regarding the official story on who was responsible for the attacks. He speculated to several interviewers that it had been conducted by the U.S. government or with the government's assistance, though readily admitting he had no way to prove his theory.
* Asked in an interview with Jody Denberg on KGSR Studio, in 2000, whether he would ever consider writing a book "like [his] buddy Hunter S. Thompson", the musician Warren Zevon responded: "Let's remember that Hunter S. Thompson is the finest writer of our generation; he didn't just toss off a book the other day..."
Education
Thompson attended Louisville Male High School and later enrolled in the United States Air Force, where he began writing for the base newspaper. Following his military service, he briefly attended the University of Kentucky but did not graduate. His writing style and journalistic approach were largely self-taught.
Interested in sports and athletically inclined from a young age, Thompson co-founded the Hawks Athletic Club while attending I.N. Bloom Elementary School, which led to an invitation to join Louisville's Castlewood Athletic Club for adolescents that prepared them for high-school sports. Ultimately, he never joined a sports team in high school. He grew up in the same neighborhood as mystery novelist Sue Grafton, who was a few years behind him in school.
Thompson attended I.N. Bloom Elementary School, Highland Middle School, and Atherton High School, before transferring to Louisville Male High School in fall 1952. Also in 1952, he was accepted as a member of the Athenaeum Literary Association, a school-sponsored literary and social club that dated to 1862. Its members at the time came from Louisville's upper-class families, and included Porter Bibb, who later became the first publisher of Rolling Stone at Thompson's behest. During this time, Thompson read and admired J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man.
As an Athenaeum member, Thompson contributed articles to and helped produce the club's yearbook The Spectator, until the group ejected Thompson in 1955 for criminal activity. Charged as an accessory to robbery after being in a car with the perpetrator, Thompson was sentenced to 60 days in Kentucky's Jefferson County Jail. He served 31 days and, during his incarceration, was refused permission to take final exams, preventing his graduation. He enlisted in the United States Air Force upon release.
In 1958, while he was an airman first class, his commanding officer recommended him for an early honorable discharge. "In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy," chief of information services Colonel William S. Evans wrote to the Eglin personnel office. "Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members."
* Richardson, Peter, Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. ISBN 9780520304925.
