Opened up my e-mail to find in the current edition of the Straits Times that Hunter S. Thompson is dead by his own hand. What’s up with that? Seems to me the guy must have either so whacked himself up with drugs, that he was terminally depressed OR he just could not stand having it made with plenty of cash and a market for his writing. Either way it makes no sense to me……
Wonder if that means Doonesbury is going to kill off Uncle Duke?
Skippy-san
See for yourself below:
Feb 21, 2005Author Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide
DENVER – Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularised a new form of fictional journalism in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.
Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,’ Mr Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News.Mr Juan Thompson found his father’s body. Thompson’s wife, Anita, was not home at the time.
Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson’s visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was Dr Thompson, a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.
Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism – or, as he dubbed it, ‘gonzo journalism’ – in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.
‘Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairy-tale artist,’ Thompson told the AP in 2003. ‘You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you’re writing about before you alter it.’
An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections as Generation of Swine and Songs of the Doomed. His first ever novel, The Rum Diary, written in 1959, was first published in 1998.
Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era, and Richard Nixon once said he represented ‘that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character’. — AP
