Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson (Louisville, Kentucky, 1937 - Woody Creek, Colorado, 2005) was an American journalist and author, regarded as a pioneer of New Journalism alongside writers such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. His name is linked to gonzo journalism, a style in which the writer stops watching from the outside and becomes a central figure in the story. His importance lies in challenging the traditional detachment of the reporter and in shaping a way of writing about politics and culture that still echoes in journalism today.

Thompson grew up in a comfortable Louisville neighborhood. After his father died in 1952, his mother, a librarian, raised him and his two brothers. His youth was unsettled: he was expelled from his high school's literary club after being involved in a robbery, served a short jail sentence, and then enlisted in the United States Air Force. There he worked as sports editor of the base newspaper at Eglin, in Florida, and wrote columns for local papers, which military rules did not allow. He left the service with an honorable discharge in 1958, following a recommendation from a superior who admired his talent but found him hard to discipline.

In New York he briefly worked as a copy boy at Time, where he retyped pages by Fitzgerald and Hemingway to absorb their rhythm. He was fired from several newspaper jobs, and in 1960 he moved to Puerto Rico, where he worked as a stringer covering the Caribbean and South America. In those years he wrote novels that only appeared much later, including The Rum Diary, published in 1998.

His breakthrough came with Hell's Angels, in 1966, after a year spent riding with the motorcycle club. The book made his name, although his relationship with the riders ended violently. Next came The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, published in 1970 in Scanlan's Monthly, where he first used the techniques that he would later call gonzo. That same year he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the Freak Power ticket, and lost narrowly. His work for Rolling Stone, where he served as a political correspondent, reached a wide audience. There he published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, texts that mix reporting, hallucination and criticism of the failed counterculture and of Richard Nixon's politics.

His final years were marked by health problems and an increasingly uneven output. Thompson kept writing sporadically for outlets such as Esquire and Playboy until the end of his life. He died in 2005 at his home in Colorado, by his own hand. His legacy goes beyond his style: his books remain a record of the American sixties and seventies, and his provocative, disillusioned voice has inspired generations of writers who want to tell the story from inside.