The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition

Hunter S. Thomp­son has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pur­suit of Won­der video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a high­ly Amer­i­can man­ner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choos­ing. Even his long­time fans who respect­ed some­thing about the agency evi­dent in that choice nat­u­ral­ly regret­ted that he’d made it; many of us have wished aloud that we could read his judg­ments of the past twen­ty years’ devel­op­ments in U.S. pol­i­tics, cul­ture, and soci­ety, which would cer­tain­ly fit in well enough with the nar­ra­tive of decline he’d pur­sued since the late six­ties.

At the same time, we rec­og­nize that Thomp­son’s man­ner of liv­ing would hard­ly have allowed him to live into his late eight­ies (the man him­self expressed sur­prise to have reached his six­ties), and that it was inex­tri­ca­ble from his man­ner of writ­ing. Which is not to call it the main ingre­di­ent: as gen­er­a­tions of imi­ta­tors have proven, inges­tion of con­trolled sub­stances and a dis­re­spect for tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive struc­ture do not, by them­selves, con­sti­tute a recipe for the “gonzo jour­nal­ism” Thomp­son pio­neered. In fact, he had a healthy respect for struc­ture, cul­ti­vat­ed through his ear­ly career in worka­day reportage and a self-imposed train­ing regime that involved re-typ­ing the whole of A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gats­by.

Gonzo jour­nal­ism, accord­ing to the nar­ra­tor of the video, actu­al­ly has a seri­ous ques­tion to ask: “Are not the par­tic­u­lar sub­jec­tive fil­ters by which facts and events are processed and imag­ined in a moment in his­to­ry as rel­e­vant as the facts them­selves in under­stand­ing the truth of that moment, or at least a slice of the truth?” Thomp­son’s most wide­ly read books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72 stand as two attempts at an answer. But from the late sev­en­ties onward, as his “life­long com­pan­ions of drugs and chaot­ic behav­ior nes­tled clos­er, the lines between his larg­er-than-life char­ac­ter in his work, his pub­lic per­sona, and his true self began to blur.”

It could be said that Thomp­son nev­er recov­ered the decep­tive clar­i­ty of his Fear and Loathing-era work, though he remained pro­lif­ic to the end. Indeed, there’s much of val­ue in his last three decades of writ­ing for read­ers attuned to who he real­ly was. “He was not mere­ly the char­ac­ter he por­trayed in his work and pub­lic life, but the man who cared enough, and was tal­ent­ed enough, to cre­ate this char­ac­ter in order to explore, under­stand, and rep­re­sent a very nuanced con­di­tion of the world dur­ing his time.” It would, per­haps, have been bet­ter if he’d been able, at some point, to retire the drugs, the firearms, the sun­glass­es, and the para­noia and come up with a new per­sona. What kept him from doing so? Maybe the notion, as artic­u­lat­ed by his great inspi­ra­tion Fitzger­ald, that there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read 9 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Hunter S. Thomp­son, Exis­ten­tial­ist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Find­ing Mean­ing in Life

Read 18 Lost Sto­ries From Hunter S. Thompson’s For­got­ten Stint As a For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son Typed Out The Great Gats­by & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learn­ing How to Write Like the Mas­ters

Hunter Thomp­son Died 15 Years Ago: Hear Him Remem­bered by Tom Wolfe, John­ny Depp, Ralph Stead­man, and Oth­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.