Hunter S. Thompson

American · 1937 to 2005

Born Hunter Stockton Thompson on July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, the first of three sons of Jack Robert Thompson, an insurance adjuster and First World War veteran, and Virginia Ray Thompson, later head librarian at the Louisville Free Public Library, he grew up in the city's affluent Cherokee Triangle neighborhood until his father's death in 1952 left the family in reduced circumstances. A restless, gifted teenager, he ran with a gang of pranksters and in 1956 was jailed thirty days as an accessory to a robbery, a conviction that cost him his high school diploma and any hope of college. He enlisted in the Air Force instead, talked his way onto the base newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and was discharged in 1958 with a superior's report recommending he never work near an Air Force publication again. He drifted through sports writing, a stint as a copy boy at Time, and freelance reporting from Puerto Rico and South America before settling in California in the mid-1960s, where a magazine assignment to ride with the Hell's Angels became his first book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966). A 1970 dispatch for Scanlan's Monthly, written in a deadline panic from torn-out notebook pages, gave rise to what an editor christened gonzo journalism, reporting that put the reporter's own drug-soaked, half-invented experience at the center of the story. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), a hallucinatory account of a Las Vegas assignment gone sideways, made him famous, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 followed the McGovern-Nixon race for Rolling Stone. He spent his later decades at Owl Farm, his compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, writing sports columns while his health declined. In pain from a broken leg and hip surgery, he shot himself at Owl Farm on February 20, 2005, at sixty-seven.