Stephen Schwartz on Hunter S. Thompson:
One must imagine that in his own middle '60s Hunter Thompson looked into the mirror and saw that nobody needed a gonzo interpretation of the world after September 11, that nobody was amused by his capacity to survive fatal doses of sinister concoctions, and that, increasingly, nobody knew or cared who he was.
I just remember reading the series "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in Rolling Stone in 1972, as a college kid. Looking back now, I think some of his appeal was that with all the truly stupid and self-destructive behaviors I was engaging in, he made me look sane and sober by comparison.
Here's the NY Times obit , and more remembrances and tributes here at www.gonzo.org.
UPDATE 2/23: Tom Wolfe remembers Thompson:
Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was.Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language.
More great HST stories from Austin Ruse.
Posted by dan at February 22, 2005 01:04 AM