Modified On February 21, 2005
SHECKYmagazine.com editor Brian McKim:
Hunter Thompson and I shared a birthday (same day, different year, I might stress). When I got to journalism school, at Bowling Green State University in 1975, they couldn’t shut up about New Journalism. Thompson was lumped in with all the rest of the New Journalists. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Hell’s Angels– if you were in journalism school in Ohio in 1975, they were practically required reading. I enjoyed them all immensely. I read Vegas at least two more times. I read Great Shark Hunt. Someone gave me a copy The Curse of Lono in 1983– it was ghastly. I was in mourning. Thompson had lost it. I don’t think anyone can argue that his writing was worth a damn after that. Occasionally, the writing had the same spark as his early work, but his stuff for ESPN.com was uniformly garbled, a self-parody. And his appearance on Letterman a few years back was difficult to watch. It dispelled any notion that his gonzo shtick was an act of some sort.
I picked up a couple of biographies of Thompson about three years ago, E. Jean Carroll’s Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson and Peter O Whitmer’s When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson: A Very Unauthorized Biography. They both popped up, on two separate occasions, in thrift shops. Both books provided insight into the guy who was, briefly, a hero of mine. He was one jammed up individual. So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw the headline this morning. I would have been sadder if I hadn’t read those two biographies. Too bad they didn’t make better movies of his life than that awful Bill Murray thing and that Johnny Depp monstrosity. Neither picture dealt with him seriously. Perhaps Thompson himself didn’t deal with himself seriously enough.