I’m curious as to your replies. I’m a fan, I love his crazed style of writing, but I think he kinda fizzled out quickly after the 1970’s due to his escalating alcohol and illegal (coke) drug abuse.
I went back and watched his early to mid 1980’s interviews with Letterman…to me he looked like a drug addled, rambling, barely coherent version of himself.
I guess that’s neither here nor there, apparently he “created” Gonzo journalism, which I always found to be highly entertaining, but factually uneven. I always felt the beauty of Hunter’s writing was that it always felt that he was blurring reality and drugs (or whatever) in a way that was entertaining, but that in his later years he became a babbling, wasted wreck of his former self.
Besides his early political books (Campaign Trail) and running for Sheriff of Aspen under the Freak Power ticket, what impact has he really had besides entertainment? Was there really a diseased cultural underbelly that only he could have exposed in this way?
Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President about the 1960 campaign, the first time any reporter had gone behind the scenes of the campaigns and revealed to the public the small details that went into one. It was a blockbuster, and changed everything about political reporting. The campaign itself had never been the story before. After White, that’s all that reporters cared about.
He wrote more books about the 1964 and 1968 campaigns that were equal bestsellers. He made politics seem exalted, a profession fit for the best and brightest.
Then came Vietnam and Nixon. White wrote another book about the 1972 campaign, peddling the same hagiographies. Somehow he failed to notice that Watergate had happened and was the real face of politics.
Who knew better? Readers of Rolling Stone. The reason that Jann Wenner is revered in some circles is not because of the rock journalism but because of the political coverage of the 1972 campaign. Two great books came out of it. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, exposing the treacherous slime that oozed out of Nixon’s White House, and The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, foreward by Thompson, reporting on the reporters and revealing how much they were leaving out of their reports or missing altogether. By 1974 White was disgraced and never produced anything of equal importance again, despite his 1976 mea culpa Breach of Faith: the Fall of Richard Nixon. To be honest, Thompson never did either, although *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas *was entertaining despite being a novel purporting to be fact.
The real reporting on Nixon produced a climate where the reporting of Watergate became possible. The Washington Post and New York Times had to admit that they either became cowardly dinosaurs or they stopped believing in the sanctity of Washington politics and started wading through the Nixonian sewers. They did, for a while at least. Post Nixon, they too often tried to make believe that he was simply an aberration but occasionally the grim reality got through.
Rolling Stone didn’t invent this countercultural political reporting and neither did Thompson, but they put it on the national stage at just the right time. That’s of true historical importance, before Watergate, before The Pentagon Papers, before Iran-Contra. Did it make a particle of difference in the election? Nope. But Nixon was gone less than two years later. That mattered, then and now.
Thompson was a combination of fierce advocacy, inside access and knowledge, and writing that directly accessed his id (sometimes drug-addled, sometimes not). But he wouldn’t have succeeded nearly so well if he hadn’t often been making great points about the things that happened behind the scenes as political sausage was made. He was certainly the first person I’d read who gave specific examples of fear as a political weapon, focused on the campaign season.
He could also be very funny. It’s not clear if he made up all those stories, but I really don’t care.
I can’t recall exactly where, but he later “confessed” to have written most of his books perfectly sober, that it wouldn’t have been possible to have been as messed up as he claimed and still have operated a complex piece of machinery like a typewriter.
My understanding is that Thompson was basically the first writer to write non-fictional, journalistic pieces in, for lack of a better term, a really fucked up way. There were people who wrote fiction in a fucked up way, like James Joyce and various Beat Generation figures, but their bizarro stories existed in a self-contained world. Thompson wrote about real life events in a really fucked up way, because…he was really fucked up.
He was a very gifted humorist and surrealist. That would have made him a noteworthy writer in itself, but the fact that he combined that with the concept of journalism is what really made him significant. And then on top of that, he added the element of psychedelic drugs, which was very much a part of the zeitgeist at that time. So, all three of these things made him a very important countercultural literary figure.
I also think he was sort of a singular phenomenon and won’t be duplicated by anyone. Because of the very idiosyncratic and distinctive style of his work, anyone else writing in that style will be inevitably compared to him and accused of copying him. Which will basically be true. So he didn’t really “invent” Gonzo journalism so much as he WAS Gonzo journalism, and it died with him. That’s my take on it.
Interesting. As I comb my brain thinking of all of his books, of which I have read them all, which one I like the most, actually it’s probably The Proud Highway. I think one of the most amazing things about Hunter was his massive output of letters, like in that book. At that time, he wrote letters to everyone. And kept carbons of all of them, or at least, most of them. That’s pretty astounding when viewed through the lens of today when most people no longer write paper letters.
I also recently read his son Juan’s book about him…Hunter was a terrible father. Just awful. But it’s still a decent read and gives some insights in what it was like to grow up with Hunter. Apparently Hunter struggled to keep his money situation together, even at the height of his fame.
The New Journalism had been around for a decade by then. It was pioneered at Esquire and at New York, which was the magazine of the New York Herald Tribune before it went off on its own after the paper died. Tom Wolfe was at the Trib, and he’s the obvious progenitor of Thompson’s style. The difference was that Wolfe was an omniscient observer who left himself entirely out and Thompson gave himself a first person pov. Also nobody else would print Thompson’s ramblings except Rolling Stone, a publication that was more used to and tolerant of incoherent drug freaks. And even they got sick and tired of Thompson as the years went by.
The only real successors are blog writers, because they’re self-published, self-edited, and free of deadlines. No professional organization could stay in business with a staff full of gonzos.
Do you really think so? Is that because of political correctness or simply that the publishing world has largely moved on from magazines and newspapers?
I agree, but still…was Hunter culturally important? Artistically? Was he a great writer, or just a dude full of drugs, piss, vim and vigor that ignited the imaginations of the counterculture?
I don’t see any reason he can’t be both. A true American icon who went out with a bang…in more ways than one.
One of my favorite HST bits is in the documentary film/book “Anthem”. It has a perfect tagline:* “Shainee and Kristen try to get an interview with the Gonzo journalist for their road trip movie, Anthem. Here’s what happens instead.”*
Why solicit our opinions? Get a copy of “Fear and Loathing” and judge for yourself.
A friend of mine claims he met Thompson. Won a twenty dollar bet from him on a football game. Thompson paid him by check, betting that the guy would rather have his autograph on a check than the twenty bucks. He was right.
He wasted a lot of his talent, and maybe he didn’t reach some star. But FALILV as a magazine piece was like Holy Shit! It was already a (whoosh of a) book in that form. He had some successes, but I admit he didn’t have mastery over his gift. He might have been the left wing donald trump it just occurred to me. But he was not very progressive.
I have often thought of the mincemeat he’d have made of Donald Trump. Wish he were here.
The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear. Hunter S. Thompson
