Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson

July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005

Thompson was an American journalist and author.
He is most famous for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas




"In a closed society where everyone is guilty, the only crime is getting caught."
- Hunter S. Thompson





Thompson is credited as the creator of Gonzo Journalism




Thompson is known for his use of alcohol, psychedelics and firearms



He is also known for his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism


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Hunter Stockton Thompson - Biography

Biography of Hunter Stockton Thompson

July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005







Hunter S. Thompson was, in my opinion, one of the greatest minds of our time. His uncanny ability to meld his wild, artist insticts with the intelligent thought of an intellectual giant was, and is, amazing!





Early Years

Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky but grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands. His parents were Jack Robert and Virginia Davidson Ray who married in 1935. His father died when Hunter was 14 years old leaving his mother to raise him and his two younger brothers Davison and James.
Hunter was interested in sports and athletics from an early age. He joined Louisville's Castlewood Athletic Club where he excelled at baseball. He never joined any sports teams in high school. During high school he was known to be constantly in trouble.


Education

Thompson attended the I.N Bloom Elementary School. Then went on to Atherton High School. He transfered to Louisville High School in 1952. Later in the year he was accepted as a member of the Athenaeum Literary Association. Thompson contributed articles and helped edit the Athenaeum yearbook The Spectator. He was ejected from the group in 1955 because of his legal problems. Thompson was charged as an accessory to robbery after having been in a car with the person who committed the robbery. He sereved a 30 day jail sentence and then joined the U.S. Air Force a week after his release.

Military Career

Thompson did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Later he transferred to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to study electronics. He applied to become a pilot but was rejected by the Air Force's aviation-cadet program. In 1956, he transferred to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. There he worked in the information-services department and became the sports editor of the base's newspaper, The Command Courier. In this capacity, he covered the Eglin Eagles, a base football team that included such future professional stars as Max McGee and Zeke Bratkowski. Thompson traveled with the team around the U.S., covering its games. In 1957, he also wrote a sports column anonymously for The Playground News, a local newspaper in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

In 1958, Thompson left the Air Force as an Airman First Class, having been recommended for an early honorable discharge by his commanding officer. "In summary, this airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy," Col. William S. Evans, chief of information services wrote to the Eglin personnel office. "Sometimes his rebel and superior attitude seems to rub off on other airmen staff members." Thompson claimed in a mock press release he wrote about the end of his duty to have been issued a "totally unclassifiable" status.

Early Journalism Career

After the Air Force, he worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania before moving to New York City. There he attended Columbia University's School of General Studies part-time on the G.I. Bill, taking classes in short-story writing.

Thompson's friends and letters from this period note he was an avid reader of the Beat Generation during his early years as a writer and that he associated himself with the Beat culture while living in New York City. He would later befriend such Beat authors as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

During this time he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week. While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors. In 1959, Time fired him for insubordination. Later that year, he worked as a reporter for The Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York. He was fired from this job after damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant who happened to be an advertiser with the paper.

In 1960 Thompson moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to take a job with the sporting magazine El Sportivo. Thompson had first applied for a job with the Puerto Rico English-language daily The San Juan Star and its managing editor, future novelist William J. Kennedy but he was unsuccessful. After the demise of El Sportivo, Thompson worked as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune and a few stateside papers on Caribbean issues with his editor Kennedy. After returning to the States, Hunter lived in California, working as a security guard and caretaker at the Big Sur Hot springs for an eight-month period in 1961, just before it became the Esalen Institute. While there, he was able to publish his first magazine feature in the nationally-distributed Rogue magazine on the artisan and bohemian culture of Big Sur. The article got him fired from his job as a caretaker.

During this period, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, and submitted many short stories to publishers with little success. The Rum Diary, which fictionalized Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico, was eventually published in 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.

From May 1962 to May 1963, Thompson traveled to South America as a correspondent for a Dow Jones-owned weekly newspaper, the National Observer. In Brazil, he spent several months working also as a reporter on the Brazil Herald, the country's only English-language daily, published in Rio de Janeiro. His longtime girlfriend Sandra Dawn Conklin (aka Sandy Conklin Thompson, now Sondi Wright) later joined him in Rio.

Thompson and Conklin were married on May 19, 1963, shortly after they returned to the United States. They briefly relocated to Aspen, Colorado, and had one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, born March 23, 1964. The couple conceived five more times together. Three of the pregnancies were miscarried, and the other two pregnancies produced infants who died shortly after birth. Hunter and Sandy divorced in 1980 but remained close friends until Thompson's death.

In 1964 the Thompson family then moved to California, where Thompson continued to write for the National Observer on an array of domestic subjects, including a story about his 1964 visit to Ketchum, Idaho, in order to investigate the reasons for Ernest Hemingway's suicide. While working on the story, Thompson symbolically stole a pair of elk antlers hanging above the front door of Hemingway's cabin. Thompson and the editors at the Observer eventually had a falling out after the paper refused to print Thompson's review of Tom Wolfe's 1965 essay collection The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and he moved to San Francisco, immersing himself in the drug and hippie culture that was taking root in the area. About this time he began writing for the Berkeley underground paper The Spyder.