Writing style
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 reportage 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. His writing aimed to be humorous, colorful and bizarre, and he often exaggerated events to be more entertaining.
The term Gonzo has since been applied in kind to numerous other forms of highly subjective artistic expression.
Despite his 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 would later describe 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."
The majority of Thompson's most popular and acclaimed work appeared within the pages of
Rolling Stone magazine. Along with Joe Eszterhas and David Felton, Thompson was instrumental in expanding the focus of the magazine past music criticism; indeed, Thompson was the only staff writer of the epoch never to contribute a music feature to the magazine. Nevertheless, his articles were always peppered with a wide array of pop music references ranging from Howlin' Wolf to Lou Reed. Armed with early fax machines wherever he went, he became notorious for haphazardly sending sometimes illegible material to the magazine's San Francisco offices as an issue was about to go to press.
Robert Love, Thompson's editor of 23 years at
Rolling Stone, wrote 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 close friends with many prominent Democrats, veterans of the ten 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."
Discerning the line between the fact and the fiction of Thompson's work presented a practical problem for editors and fact-checkers of his work. 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."
Persona
Thompson often used a blend of fiction and fact when portraying himself in his writing as well, sometimes using the name Raoul Duke as an author surrogate whom he generally described as a callous, erratic, self-destructive journalist who constantly drank alcohol and took hallucinogenic drugs. Fantasizing about causing bodily harm to others was also a characteristic in his work used to comedic effect and an example of his brand of humor.
In the late sixties, Thompson obtained his famous title of "Doctor" from the Universal Life Church. He later preferred to be called Dr. Thompson, and his "alter-ego" Raoul Duke called himself a "doctor of journalism". Thompson was as fond of personae as W.C. Fields: besides "Raoul Duke", Thompson also toyed with the idea of taking the names "Jefferson Rank", "Gene Skinner", and "Sebastian Owl" for various purposes literary and non-literary, naming his "compound" in Woody Creek, Colorado, "Owl Farm" after the last of these.
A number of critics have commented that as he grew older the line that distinguished Thompson from his literary self became increasingly blurred. Thompson himself admitted during a 1978 BBC interview that he sometimes felt pressured to live up to the fictional self that he had created, adding "I'm never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often, they conflict ... most often, as a matter of fact. ...I'm leading a normal life and right along side me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be."
Thompson's writing style and eccentric persona gave him a cult following in both literary and drug circles, and his cult status expanded into broader areas after being twice portrayed in major motion pictures. Hence, both his writing style and persona have been widely imitated, and his likeness has even become a popular costume choice for Halloween.
Political beliefs
In the documentary
Breakfast With Hunter, Hunter S. 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 passionately on behalf of African American rights and the African American Civil Rights Movement. He strongly criticised the dominance in American society of, what he called, "white power structures". He was a proponent of the right to bear arms and privacy rights. A member of the National Rifle Association, Thompson was also co-creator of "The Fourth Amendment Foundation", an organization to assist victims in defending themselves against unwarranted search and seizure.
Part of his work with The Fourth Amendment Foundation centered around support of Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman who was sentenced for life in 1997 under felony murder charges for the death of police officer Bruce VanderJagt, despite contradictory statements and dubious evidence. Thompson organized rallies, provided legal support, and co-wrote an article in the June 2004 issue of
Vanity Fair, outlining the case. The Colorado Supreme Court eventually overturned Auman's sentence in March 2005, shortly after Thompson's death, and Auman is now free. Auman's supporters claim Thompson's support and publicity resulted in the successful appeal.
Thompson was a firearms and explosives enthusiast (in his writing and in real life) and owned a vast collection of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and various automatic and semi-automatic weapons, along with numerous forms of gaseous crowd control and many other homemade devices.
Thompson was also an ardent supporter of drug legalization and became known for his less-than-shy accounts of his own drug usage. He was an early supporter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and served on the group's advisory board for over 30 years until his death. He told an interviewer in 1997 that drugs should be legalized "Across the board. It might be a little rough on some people for a while, but I think it's the only way to deal with drugs. Look at Prohibition: all it did was make a lot of criminals rich."
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Thompson voiced skepticism regarding the official story on who was responsible for the attacks. He suggested to several interviewers that it may have been conducted by the U.S. Government or with the government's assistance. In 2002, Thompson told a radio show host "You sort of wonder when something like that happens, well, who stands to benefit? Who had the opportunity and the motive? You just kind of look at these basic things [...] I saw that the US government was going to benefit, and the White House people, the Republican administration to take the mind of the public off the crashing economy. [...] And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well in the White House and you know, campaigns and I've known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the news or whatever event, is never really what happened."
In 2004 Thompson, regarding politics, wrote: "Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for ... but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush—Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him."
Works
Letters
Thompson wrote many letters and they were his primary means of personal conversation. Thompson made carbon copies of all his letters, usually typed, a habit that began in his teenage years. His letters were sent to friends, public officials and reporters.
Some of his letters have begun to be published in a series of books called
The Fear and Loathing Letters. The first volume,
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955 - 1967, is over 650 pages, while the second volume
Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist passed 700. Douglas Brinkley, who edits the letter series, said that for every letter included, fifteen were cut. Brinkley estimated Thompson's own archive to contain over 20,000 letters. According to Amazon.com, the last of the three planned volumes of Thompson's letters was allegedly to be published on January 1, 2007 as
The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop 1977-2005. Anita Thompson has said on her blog that the collection will be released sometime in February. Amazon.com currently lists the publication date on its site as February 1, 2011.
Many biographies have been written about Thompson, although he did not write an autobiography. But his letters contained "asides" to "his biographers" that he assumed could be "reading in" on his collected letters. Some of these letters were already bundled into Thompson's
Kingdom of Fear, though it is not considered an autobiography.
Illustrations
Accompanying the eccentric and colorful writing of Hunter Thompson, illustrations by British artist Ralph Steadman offer visual representations of the Gonzo style. Steadman and Thompson developed a close friendship, and often traveled together. Though his illustrations occur in most of Thompson's books, they are conspicuously featured in full page color in Thompson's The Curse of Lono, set in Hawaii.
Photography
Thompson was an avid amateur photographer throughout his life and his photos have been exhibited since his death at art galleries in the United States and United Kingdom. In late 2006, AMMO Books published a limited-edition 224 page collection of Thompson photos called
GONZO, with an introduction by Johnny Depp. Thompson's snapshots were a combination of the subjects he was covering, stylized self-portraits, and artistic still life photos. The
London Observer called the photos "astonishingly good" and that "Thompson's pictures remind us, brilliantly in every sense, of very real people, real colours".
Films
The film
Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) depicts Thompson's attempts at writing stories for both the Super Bowl and the 1972 U.S. presidential election. It stars Bill Murray as Thompson and Peter Boyle as Thompson's attorney Oscar Acosta, referred to in the movie as Carl Lazlo, Esq.
The 1998 film adaptation of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was directed by Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam, and starred Johnny Depp (who moved into Hunter's basement to 'study' Thompson's persona before assuming his role in the film) as "Hunter Thompson/Raoul Duke" and Benicio del Toro as Oscar Acosta, referred to in the movie as "Dr. Gonzo". The film has achieved something of a cult following.
A film is currently in production based on Thompson's novel
The Rum Diary. It is scheduled for a 2010 release, starring Johnny Depp as the main character, Paul Kemp. The novel's premise was inspired by Thompson's own experiences in Puerto Rico. Bruce Robinson is directing.
Documentaries
"
Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood" (1978) is an extended television profile by the BBC. It can be found on disc 2 of "
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" The Criterion Collection edition.
The Mitchell brothers, owners of the O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, made a documentary about Thompson in 1988 called
Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die.
Wayne Ewing created three documentaries about Thompson. The film
Breakfast With Hunter (2003) was directed and edited by Ewing. It documents Thompson's work on the movie
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his arrest for drunk driving, and his subsequent fight with the court system.
When I Die (2005) is a video chronicle of making Thompson's final farewell wishes a reality, and documents the send-off itself.
Fear and Loathing in Denver (2006) chronicles Thompson efforts in helping to free Lisl Auman who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the shooting of a police officer, a crime she didn't commit. All three films are only available online.
In
Come on Down: Searching for the American Dream (2004) Thompson gives director Adamm Liley insight into the nature of the American Dream over drinks at the Woody Creek Tavern.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride: Hunter S. Thompson On Film (2006) was directed by Tom Thurman, written by Tom Marksbury, and produced by the Starz Entertainment Group. The original documentary features interviews with Thompson's inner circle of family and friends, but the thrust of the film focuses on the manner in which his life often overlapped with numerous Hollywood celebrities who became his close friends, such as Johnny Depp, Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Thompson's wife Anita, son Juan, former Senators George McGovern and Gary Hart, writers Tom Wolfe and William F. Buckley, actors Gary Busey and Harry Dean Stanton, and the illustrator Ralph Steadman among others.
"Blasted!!! The Gonzo Patriots of Hunter S. Thompson" (2006), produced, directed, photographed and edited by Blue Kraning, is a documentary about the scores of fans who volunteered their privately owned artillery to fire the ashes of the late author, Hunter S Thompson.
Blasted!!! premiered at the 2006 Starz Denver International Film Festival, part of a tribute series to Hunter S. Thompson held at the Denver Press Club.
In 2008, Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (
The Smartest Guys in the Room,
Taxi to the Dark Side) wrote and directed a documentary on Thompson, entitled
The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The film premiered on January 20, 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival. Gibney uses intimate, never-before-seen home videos, interviews with friends, enemies and lovers, and clips from films adapted from Thompson's material to document his turbulent life.
Theatre
GONZO: A Brutal Chrysalis is a one-man show about Hunter S.Thompson written by Paul Addis. Set in the writing den of Thompson's Woody Creek home, the show presents the life of Hunter during the years between 1968 and 1971. Addis played the role of Hunter during the show's original run until his arrest for the Burning Man early torching on August 28, 2007.
Accolades and tributes
- Author Tom Wolfe has called Thompson the greatest American comic writer of the 20th century.
- The 2006 documentary film Fuck, which features Hunter S Thompson commenting on the usage of that word, is dedicated to his memory.
- Thompson appeared on the cover of the 1,000th issue of Rolling Stone (May 18 - June 1, 2006) as a devil playing the guitar next to the two "L"'s in the word "Rolling". Johnny Depp also appeared on the cover.
- The Thompson-inspired character Uncle Duke appears on a recurring basis in Doonesbury, the daily newspaper comic strip by Garry Trudeau. When the character was first introduced, Thompson protested, quoted in an interview as saying that he would set Trudeau on fire if the two ever met, although it was reported that he liked the character in later years. Between March 7, 2005 (roughly two weeks after Thompson's suicide) and March 12, 2005, Doonesbury ran a tribute to Hunter, with Uncle Duke lamenting the death of the man he called his "inspiration." The first of these strips featured a panel with artwork similar to that of Ralph Steadman, and later strips featured various non sequiturs (with Duke variously transforming into a monster, melting, shrinking to the size of an empty drinking glass, or people around him turning into animals) which seemed to mirror some of the effects of hallucinogenic drugs described in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
- Besides Uncle Duke, Thompson served as the inspiration for two other comic strip characters. Underground comix creator turned animation/cartooning historian Scott Shaw! used an anthropomorphic dog named "Pointer X. Toxin" in a number of his works. Matt Howarth has created a number of comic books in his "Bugtown" universe with a Thompson-inspired character named "Monseiuer Boche", as well as a musician named "Savage Henry", the name of a drug dealer (or "scag baron") mentioned in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.
- Spider Jerusalem, the gonzo journalist protagonist of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, is largely based on Thompson.
- Adult Swim's animated series The Venture Bros. featured a character named Hunter Gathers (who looks and acts much like Thompson) employed by the fictional Office of Secret Intelligence as a trainer.
- Flying Dog Brewery is a self-proclaimed "gonzo brewery" started by Hunter's long time friend and neighbor George Stranahan. Flying Dog's Gonzo Imperial Porter is a tribute to Hunter. All the bottle labels are designed by Ralph Steadman.
- Los Angeles based indie rock band Fat City Reprise's name is a tribute to Thompson's failed bid for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970.
- American heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold wrote their song Bat Country in tribute to Thompson. It was featured on their 2005 album City of Evil and uses the quote "He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man".