On the surface, the two were quite different in temperament. Kerouac was a shy, sensitive boy and Thompson was an extroverted hell-raiser, but there were similarities. They were both bookish but athletic. Thompson became an excellent baseball player until one of his legs grew longer than the other and he was forced to give up sports, whilst Kerouac played football until an injury caused him to quit in university. Thompson grew to prefer football as a spectator and ultimately started and ended his writing career as a sports reporter. Kerouac liked baseball, excelled in football, but mostly quit sports for a life writing poetry and prose.

Kerouac lost his father, Leo, at the age of 24 and Thompson lost his when he was only a teenager. The death of Leo caused Kerouac to become even closer to his mother but for Thompson the opposite was true. Kerouac had always been a momma’s boy but Thompson had mostly been abusive (sometimes physically) towards Virginia Thompson, and his father’s death worsened that attitude. For the rest of his life, Kerouac would stay close to his mother but Thompson avoided trips back to Louisville as much as possible.

Both of them got into trouble as young men, though Thompson was an outright criminal whilst Kerouac was more of a miscreant. (In many ways, Thompson was more like Neal Cassady than Jack Kerouac.) Kerouac got himself into tertiary education but Thompson missed his high-school graduation after one too many arrests. This forced him into a brief career in the Air Force, which is another connection, for Kerouac briefly joined the Navy and then later signed up for the Merchant Marine. Neither man was suited for military discipline, though, and Kerouac was booted out of the Navy after a psychiatric evaluation and Thompson eventually was discharged after two years of resisting authority.

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Both Kerouac and Thompson got into alcohol early in life and could fairly be called alcoholics by their mid-twenties. Kerouac used it to overcome his shyness and became a boisterous, often sloppy drunk, whereas Thompson needed alcohol to function and was rarely seen drunk in spite of consuming prodigious quantities of whisky on a daily basis. Each man would increasingly come to rely on booze as he aged, with Kerouac drinking himself to death in 1969 at the age of just 47 and Thompson destroying his health over a longer period, eventually shooting himself in 2005 at the age of 67.

They both experimented with and wrote about other substances, though once again Thompson went much further and became dependent upon some of them (most damagingly, cocaine).

Kerouac found himself in New York in the mid-forties, where he helped form the core of the Beat Generation, and it was a decade later that Thompson ended up there. Both of them studied literature at Columbia, although Kerouac was an undergraduate (who dropped out) and Thompson merely did a few short courses. They both lived in Greenwich Village and they even drank at some of the same bars. They were both part of the hipster scene of marijuana and jazz (although Thompson was not nearly as immersed in it).

By the time Thompson moved to New York, he was aware of the Beats and had read Kerouac, for On the Road had been published in 1957 and he moved to the city soon after. He was initially impressed by Beat literature but soon came to disparage it—possibly because it was too popular for his outsider tastes. He quickly grew to loathe the beatnik poseurs who imitated the real Beat writers.

The two men did not meet but in New York Thompson saw Kerouac on a TV screen and then later caught him reading at the Living Theater with Gregory Corso, though neither reading left much of an impression. Thompson heckled Corso (who was himself an incorrigible heckler) but had enough respect to quietly listen to Kerouac.

After leaving New York, Thompson participated in a cross-country road-trip that was possibly Kerouac-inspired and which ended at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He listened to poetry there and later admitted a respect for owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (Thompson was not one to hand out compliments, so this is rare.) Thompson then headed for Big Sur but missed Kerouac, who’d been staying at Ferlinghetti’s cabin until a few months earlier.

Although Thompson initially appreciated Kerouac’s work (and perhaps elements of his lifestyle), he was scathing in his comments during the first half of the sixties. In fact, he said in a number of letters to friends that Kerouac’s work was a disappointment after On the Road. Even as early as late 1958, he said:

And certainly I’ve read The Subterraneans: all of his crap for that matter. The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia. The Dharma thing was not quite as bad as The Subterraneans and they’re both withered appendages to On the Road—which isn’t even a novel in the first place. As the Siamese say, “Pea rattles loud in empty head.” And so much for Mr. K—who found a way out of it all. Bully for him… and all his lemmings. If somebody doesn’t kill that fool soon, we’re all going to be labeled “The Generation of the Third Sex.”

It got worse from there, and in 1962 he wrote that Big Sur was “a stupid, shitty book.” He later claimed that there was a political element in his “break with” Kerouac:

…in a symbolic way I expected Kerouac to turn up in Haight Ashbury for the cause. Ginsberg was there, so it was kind of natural to expect that Kerouac would show up too. But no. That’s when Kerouac went back to his mother and voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. That’s when my break with him happened.

However, we can see that he’d already lost respect long before 1964.

What is interesting, though, is that over the next decades Thompson tended to speak with increasing respect for Kerouac and even said that there was some degree of literary influence. He once wrote:

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer... in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend. Kerouac taught me that you could get away with writing about drugs and get published […] I wasn’t trying to write like him, but I could see that I could get published like him and make the breakthrough, break through the Eastern establishment ice.

Elsewhere, he called On the Road “a long rambling piece of personal journalism,” which is important because “personal journalism” is precisely what he thought of as his own literary form.

One does not tend to think of their writing styles as similar, but Thompson eventually came to practise some kind of spontaneous prose. Early in his career, he meticulously rewrote each piece of writing but later he abandoned this and relied on his notes. Even when sitting at his typewriter, he sometimes had a Kerouacian style. According to Tim Crouse, who accompanied him on the campaign trail of 1971/72,

He would sit at the card table with a Selectric in front of him, his elbows out to the sides, sitting up very straight, and then he would get this sort of electric jolt and start to type. He’d type a sentence and then wait again with his arms out, and he would get another jolt and type another sentence. Watching him, I began to realize that what he was trying to do was to bypass leaded attitudes, received ideas, clichés, anything like that and go to something that had more to do with his unconscious and his immediate perception of things. He wanted to somehow get the sentence out before anything could interfere with it in the way of convention or preconception.

This sounds uncannily like “first thought, best thing,” does it not?

Certainly, they both wrote about their eras in original styles and they did so from a first-person perspective that was largely factual but with some degree of fiction layered upon it. Both writers explored the United States and wrote wildly popular books that documented their adventures. However, even here we find very notable differences. In Kerouac’s “Duluoz legend,” the narrators (all based on Kerouac) tended to focus more on his friends (Cassady, Snyder, etc.) but Thompson was mostly interested in himself. Kerouac called his books novels and Thompson presented his as journalism, yet both fancifully depicted real-life experiences. One might argue that each writer played the role of bumbling fool at times, a comic loser adrift in a chaotic world.

Although Thompson mostly wrote about himself, he found the need for a sidekick and had numerous of them throughout his career, with Ralph Steadman and Oscar Zeta Acosta being the most famous. Early in his career, he wrote a profile of his Louisville friend, Paul Semonin, and this greatly embarrassed his old pal, for Thompson had massively exaggerated and distorted his account, then published it in their hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. Kerouac would repeatedly upset his friends by depicting them in similar ways. Gary Snyder has had to live with his depiction as Japhy Ryder, William S. Burroughs was stuck with the trust-fund baby image, and Neal Cassady was ever after known as Dean Moriarty.

Thompson eventually became friends with Ginsberg and was at a few events with Cassady. He even met Burroughs late in life, but he never did meet Kerouac. It is unlikely that Kerouac was ever aware of Hunter S. Thompson, for by the time the latter was well-known, Kerouac was a drunken semi-recluse with little interest in the counterculture (which was Thompson’s subject in the late sixties). Kerouac likely never read Hell’s Angels and was dead by the time Thompson was at his peak in 1970-72. However, Thompson mentioned Kerouac quite a few times. As noted above, he was initially impressed, then later scornful, but oddly as he aged Thompson came around to Kerouac and viewed him as a fellow traveller. He saw the Beats as allies in the field of outsider literature.

By the end of his life, Thompson was rather flattering. He’d been stingy with praise throughout most of his life, but apparently in 1998 he was in a nostalgic and generous mood. He said Kerouac “remains one of my heroes,” and acknowledged that “he was a great influence on me […] Jack was an artist in every way.”

You can read more about Thompson and Kerouac, as well as the other Beat writers, in this long essay from 2020. A more focused piece on Thompson’s friendship with Ginsberg can be found here. To learn about Thompson’s other literary influences, see this essay:

For everything you could possibly want to know about Thompson’s writing, see my 2021 book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.

In this essay, I want to compare The Rum Diary with The Sun Also Rises, suggesting that Thompson used Hemingway’s novel as a template. I don’t want to overstate things and obviously there are many significant differences, so after discussing what I see as similarities between them, I will later acknowledge key factors that show how Thompson moved away from his hero’s work and into his own style.

First of all, before we get into my personal observations on these two books, I want to offer a few bits of evidence to prove that I am not—as is so often the case in these types of essays—merely looking for something that is not there. Literary essays are frequently intellectual exercises intended to show off the writer’s knowledge and draw connections that are largely imagined. But it is undeniable that Thompson was thinking of The Sun Also Rises when he wrote his book. In addition to simply admiring Hemingway and TSAR (which I will use as an acronym for The Sun Also Rises from now on, to avoid repetition), Thompson explicitly compared the books on several occasions, including this quote from a 1961 letter written in Big Sur (a year after his time in Puerto Rico, which inspired the novel):

The Rum Diary, since you ask, is more than halfway done. It is a novel that will be about 200 pages long and I have every reason to believe it will put me over the hump. It is set, of course, in Puerto Rico and I imagine you will not find all of it unfamiliar. […] In a twisted way, it will do for San Juan what The Sun Also Rises did for Paris. I expect to finish it around September.[i]

This was in a letter to William Kennedy, a friend of Thompson’s, who later confirmed:

He thought of The Rum Diary as The Sun Also Rises in Puerto Rico.[ii]

Thompson said several times that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas surpassed TSAR but it was not a novel—at least not in the conventional sense. The Rum Diary, of course, was not published until 1998, more than three decades after The Rum Diary was written. He was keen to compete with Hemingway and Fitzgerald in terms of quality but he also took them as models for his writing, frequently plotting work according to these great literary achievements. When working on Polo is my Life, for example, he made notes asking who would be the Gatsby character, who would be Nick Carraway, and so on. Gatsby was always the greater book in his opinion but TSAR was a close second.

I should also note here that Thompson studied novels that he admired and made copious notes. The Jacka_lope on Instagram has made at least one video explaining this, showing Thompson’s copy of TSAR and discussing the extensive marginalia. Coupled with his process of typing out pages from the book, it is not a stretch, then, to suggest that he borrowed much from Hemingway when he sat down to work on his only published novel…

The Sun Also Rises and The Rum Diary: Similarities

First and most obviously, The Rum Diary is at its core based on the premise of TSAR. They could both be described as:

A novel about an American journalist who drinks too much in a foreign land and writes about the often violent misadventures of his fellow expatriates.

That sentence loosely captures the gist of both novels and that’s before we mention the alluring but troubled female character who comes between the narrator and his annoying friend, which is to say nothing of the sexual/romantic frustration of the narrator.

In The Rum Diary, we have Paul Kemp travelling to Puerto Rico to work as a journalist for a failing newspaper. He falls for a blonde woman he sees on the way there, but who turns out to be the girlfriend of a co-worker. Kemp is already a hard-drinking man and his boozing continues throughout the novel as he surrounds himself with the expat reporters on the island. He stews in his own lust until Chenault (the blonde) leaves her boyfriend for Kemp. She is a troubled character and eventually leaves Kemp, too.

In TSAR, the protagonist is Jake Barnes, who lives in Paris and is an expatriate journalist working for an unnamed organisation. He drinks heavily and is also sexually/romantically frustrated, but unlike Kemp this is because he has sustained an unspecified wound in the war that makes him incapable of sexual intercourse. His love interest is Brett, who like Chenault is much troubled in spite of her privileged upbringing and she also has a habit of involving herself with unpleasant men. She wants to be with Barnes but cannot because of his wound and her attachment to other male characters leaves Barnes frustrated and causes him various losses. In The Rum Diary, we learn that Chenault cannot orgasm and this seems a reference to Brett’s dilemma of having sex or love but not both, coupled with Barnes’ impotence. Both women drink and get drunk easily and pursue sex with difficult and unpleasant men.

Both books attempt to present a generation through the limited viewpoint of a small expat community and both attempt to explore big themes through a small number of characters over a short period of time with a limited amount of action. Hemingway’s book is extremely effective in this way, which is why it is widely considered a masterpiece. Thompson’s book, on the other hand, is very much a young writer’s effort and although I personally adore the book, it is no great work of art. Where Hemingway carefully says much by subtly alluding to it, Thompson overstates everything rather carelessly. Hemingway has thought a great deal about his characters but Thompson can hardly delineate his. But we’ll deal with the differences later.

Both books feature narrators of roughly the same age (Kemp 31; Barnes 34) and even though the writers themselves were much younger (both in their mid-twenties), the books deal with the fear of ageing. Hemingway writes:

Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

Thompson repeats this idea several times, including here:

This is what I told myself on those hot afternoons in San Juan when I was thirty years old[1] and my shirt stuck damply to my back and I felt myself on that big and lonely hump, with my hardnose years behind me and all the rest downhill.

Both books explore the idea that you cannot run away from your problems by going abroad. In The Rum Diary, that idea is mostly explored through Kemp but in TSAR, there are multiple characters who learn this. Robert Cohn, for example, repeatedly says he wants to escape his problems by going somewhere new, with several discussions about going to South America. Escaping to South America is also a theme in The Rum Diary. TSAR is set half in Paris and half in Spain. We learn in The Rum Diary that Kemp has been all over Europe (having lived in Paris) and several characters talk about escaping to Europe.

Hemingway begins his novel with quotes, including one from Gertrude Stein:

You are all a lost generation.

Thompson begins his with a quote and then a preamble (which is written in a fairly Hemingwayesque style) and it ends with a line that brings Stein’s quote to mind:

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey.

Structurally the books differ but broadly they have some similarities. They begin with a description of the daily lives of the journalist protagonists. Their lives are not particularly exciting—they write a little, aware that they are expected to repeat government propaganda to some extent, then they either drink coffee or alcohol. They drink coffee and read the news or drink booze and talk with the other characters. In The Rum Diary, of course, it is almost always rum that is drunk but in TSAR the drinks include but are not limited to: brandy, wine, vermouth, pastis, sherry, beer, absinthe, cognac, whiskey, various local liqueurs, and Martini.

Thompson’s book is a little more meandering but basically is about Kemp finding his feet in Puerto Rico, landing himself in jail, then going to a festival on an island. Hemingway has Barnes living his working life in Paris and then going to Spain, where he attends a festival. The chaos of these two festivals is in stark contrast to the sedate daily lives depicted before they begin.

Both festivals (or fiestas, carnivals, however you want to call them) begin with explosions. Hemingway writes:

At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.

Thompson:

It grew louder as we entered the harbor, and there was still a half mile of blue water between us and the town when I heard the first explosion.

The peaceful environment in each case morphs into a multi-day festival of noise, crowds, and general debauchery. The descriptions go on at length in each book but there are similarities. Hemingway:

People were coming into the square from all sides, and down the street we heard the pipes and the fifes and the drums coming. They were playing the riau-riau music, the pipes shrill and the drums pounding, and behind them came the men and boys dancing.

Thompson:

Another band appeared, and then others at different corners of the square, each leading a train of dancers. Four steel bands, playing the same wild tune, came together in the middle of the square.

These festivals are held by the locals but intruded upon by Americans who gleefully join the chaos and in each book bring the harmless fun to a more depraved level. Indeed, this is a theme throughout TSAR. Barnes is a frequent and respectful visitor, having won over the locals through a number of visits, but the other Americans are not and they ruin Spain in his mind. He laments, for example, that “There’s one American woman down here now that collects bull-fighters” He means that Americans go to these places and patronise the locals, acting as voyeurs and neo-colonialists, throwing their money around and destroying the culture. This, of course, is a primary theme in The Rum Diary, where Thompson’s narrator is paid to help destroy the natural beauty of the area:

I was being paid twenty-five dollars a day to ruin the only place I’d seen in ten years where I’d felt a sense of peace. Paid to piss in my own bed, as it were, and I was only here because I’d got drunk and been arrested and had thereby become a pawn in some high-level face-saving bullshit.

Whereas Barnes has brought his friends to Pamplona to see the bullfights and regrets introducing these uncouth, tactless idiots to a place and people he admired, Thompson sells out the natural beauty of the islands for easy money. Both novels explore the Ugly American concept and fixate on the idea of self-loathing. Even in Paris, Americans were ruining the place, as Barnes says:

We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.

Thompson described his book as “a book full of flogging and fighting and fucking” and elsewhere he called it “full of flogging, humping, goring and soul-rot.” Barnes obviously could not engage in any of this “fucking” or “humping” but others did, and there was certainly much “fighting” and even some “goring” in TSAR. In both books, the narrator is knocked down by a cheap shot from another angry male character and fighting happens numerous other times. There is more fighting in TSAR than The Rum Diary but evidently Thompson thought of his book as having much of it. It is also possible that earlier versions had more, for it was rewritten and edited extensively between 1961 and 1998, when it was finally published.

There is no goring in Thompson’s book in spite of that odd mention in a letter that describes his writing but in the part of The Rum Diary that most closely resembles the chaos of Pamplona from TSAR, he does manage to make a quick reference to bullfighting. The man who dances with Chenault in a scene that seemingly leads to her rape is wearing “nothing but a pair of tight, red toreador pants.”

Although the published version of The Rum Diary was changed, this scene was written in a quite racist way in an earlier manuscript and Thompson not only emphasised the blackness of the apparent rapist and made other black characters very animalistic, he also made liberal use of the slur “nigger.” This is something Hemingway inserted quite casually several times in his book. By the 1998 release, The Rum Diary had been edited to remove all uses of this word except those intended to criticise the racist attitudes of certain characters, but even by 1991 an excerpt in Songs of the Doomed repeated it often. (More on this in my book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.)

It is possible to see how Thompson built the location of Al’s Bar to be based on Café Le Select from TSAR. It is where the characters (at least in the first half of Hemingway’s book) tend to meet and talk. However, he portrayed San Juan quite differently from Paris. Although Thompson seemed to find beauty in the natural parts of Puerto Rico, most of his descriptions of the island show it to be a mosquito-ridden swamp, whereas Hemingway clearly had great affection for the landscape of rural Spain.

In terms of prose, these books differ a lot because Thompson was fusing multiple literary influences with his own emerging voice but there are traces of Hemingway’s famously sparse prose, albeit mixed with Fitzgerald’s more adjective-heavy style and the brashness of Donleavy. One could argue that he has borrowed a method of digression (or perhaps it is merely similar) in that there are casual, conversational switches from one topic back to a previous one, something Thompson would do often in his writing. For one example, in TSAR, Hemingway has Barnes say:

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story. Anyway, his office had a green baize door…

The use of “Anyway” here is similar to how Thompson liked to refocus his various narratives after digressions. He put this to use most effectively in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hemingway also inserted an unusual degree of uncertainty, with Barnes often saying “I think” or “I forget.” Thompson similarly liked this idea of an unreliable narrator who is wise at times but ignorant or forgetful elsewhere.

It is hard to overlook Hemingway’s use of “swine” as well. This of course entered the Gonzo lexis and was used excessively by Thompson, but it’s not clear that he took it from Hemingway. It is one of those words Thompson famously used often in his prose, yet it appears more in TSAR than The Rum Diary.

Finally, it may seem strange to mention these but I could not ignore them… Thompson was hugely influenced by HL Mencken and Hemingway mentions him a few times. Thompson does not mention him in this book but surely must have appreciated the references. Thompson often referred to Mencken’s brutal obituary for William Jennings Bryan and Bryan’s death is referenced in TSAR, too, shortly before one of his mentions of Mencken. Hemingway also makes a mocking reference to Horatio Alger, which Thompson did many times in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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Differences

I don’t want to get too carried away and suggest that Thompson modelled everything in his book on Hemingway or that it is obviously derivative. There are of course a great many differences. These, however, tend to speak to the writers’ talents. Thompson was still a young writer who had not yet found his voice and would never really become a great writer of fiction, instead fusing fiction and journalism in an original way, whereas Hemingway was young but arguably at the peak of his literary powers.

TSAR is the vastly superior of these books for many reasons, one of which is the depth of characters and themes. Thompson had much to say but struggled to say it. Hemingway’s characters come across as extremely real and he only touches upon certain qualities. He shows much without saying it explicitly. Thompson did not seem to really know his characters and they overlap, with several seemingly based on a single person. Ultimately, he would become a better writer once he learned to write about reality and exaggerate it comically.

Comedy is another element here that makes the books different. Thompson’s novel is serious and depressing but occasionally very funny, particularly when characters make outrageous statements, like “Mother of balls!” Again, he just couldn’t quite decide what he wanted to do or how to make it work. Hemingway had much more control. He wrote with a sparse, focused prose that was highly effective, whereas Thompson seemed to flit between styles and influences and occasionally brought in his own weird personality for random explosions of hyperbole and fantasy. Later, he would use this brilliantly in Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, but in The Rum Diary he did not quite have control of his prose. Reading these books side by side, one sees the careful, subtle, realistic, and beautiful descriptions made by Hemingway and the brash, often careless and very obvious statements made by Thompson.

Part of the problem was that Hemingway was a better observer of the world around him and Thompson—as McKeen says in the introduction to Outlaw Journalist—was pretty much always writing about himself. He split himself into multiple characters and saw everything through his own eyes, which is why he never became a great writer of fiction and why his characters always fell flat. In TSAR, even the most minor characters come across as real people and interactions hint at genuine personalities. Barnes’ concierge is a good example. He sometimes brings in minor characters and has them contribute to meaningful dialogue but for Thompson it was all about himself and his views on the world. Everyone else was just a prop and they come across as flat and artificial.

It is not only the characters; the places too are comparatively superficial in The Rum Diary. Hemingway brings Paris and Pamplona to life, as well as other places he has people merely pass through. Thompson’s depictions of Puerto Rico are better than his descriptions of characters but they are notably weak compared to Hemingway’s book. Hemingway has Barnes walk or be driven through Paris and provides vivid descriptions. Thompson’s by comparison are simple. Hemingway also provides deep insight to the culture but for Thompson the people of Puerto Rico are just violent savages who exist as a menacing threat—and sometimes more than a threat, for they often commit brutal assaults. He wants to portray the Ugly American and yet the locals still come off worse at times. Thompson did not speak Spanish and spent relatively little time in Puerto Rico, which perhaps explains this weakness but also he had—as friends pointed out—certain racial prejudices inbuilt from his upbringing that he could not shake.

We see Hemingway portray Jake Barnes and the depth of character is stunning even though so much is only alluded to. Even the injury he has sustained is never explicitly mentioned. With Thompson, everything was explicit. Perhaps the only thing in his book he was relatively subtle about was Chenault's inability to orgasm and I would argue he more or less took this from Hemingway and mashed it up.

Final Thoughts

In spite of my negative remarks in the previous section, I love The Rum Diary and have probably read it more than any other book. Yet I have always recognised that it was a glimpse into the young Hunter S. Thompson and was written before he became a great writer. He was battling between his own strange voice and the various literary influences he had taken from his extensive reading. The result was awkward prose and weak characters but an overall enjoyable story. It is nowhere near the literary masterpiece that TSAR was but it is clearly influenced by it. Thompson frequently took elements from his favourite books and I believe there is much of Hemingway in this novel.

Soon after writing (or rewriting) The Rum Diary, Thompson began writing about the Hell’s Angels and he would thereafter work primarily in journalism, bringing to it elements of fiction that would group him together with the New Journalists. We never got to find out what he would’ve done with fiction but perhaps even in the world of novel-writing he would have continued to put himself at the centre, just as he did with reporting.

You can learn more about the origins of The Rum Diary in this essay and also in my book, High White Notes.

Footnotes

[1] Thompson’s book is often inconsistent and Kemp is both 30 and 31, depending on the chapter. At one point, he seems to be twenty-nine. This is not due to the passage of time; it all happens during a short period.

Endnotes

[i] The Proud Highway, p.278

[ii] Gonzo, p.47

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Fusing fact and fiction was pretty much always a feature of his writing. As a young journalist, he subtly invented many details and exaggerated stories to make them more engaging. In this regard, he drew upon George Orwell, one of his main literary influences. Later, he became famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that no one knew how to categorise—novel or nonfiction? Likewise, his later work tended to take reality and riff upon it, usually in ways suggesting that he wanted his readers to know that he was layering fiction on top of real events. He did this for a variety of reasons, including the simple goal of making people think more about what they read.

It may seem pointless, then, to write an essay about how Thompson inserted parts of his real life into his writing. Many have already written about this, including me. It was, after all, a huge part of my 2021 High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism. I also wrote a more straightforward essay, asking simply, “Is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a True Story?”

This essay, however, is a little different. Instead of looking at the bigger issue of blending fiction and reality, it will explore the less obvious ways that Thompson took bits of his own life and included them in the books The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don’t want to talk about how these stories are themselves fictionalised autobiographies, for that has already been done (including by me) but rather to show how there are multiple instances in these books of Thompson referring to other points in his own life. We know that he was a reporter in Puerto Rico and had some intoxicated adventures in Las Vegas; these are not worth discussing right now. Instead, let’s look at more subtle allusions to places and people from his past.

The Rum Diary

Like I said, we’ll look past the obvious fact that The Rum Diary was a fictionalised account of Thompson’s own brief time in Puerto Rico. (He even called it “a memoir” in 1998.) We’ll also ignore the fact that Paul Kemp was a sort of idealised version of Thompson and that Thompson split himself between a few characters. You can read in my book and in this essay I wrote all about how Thompson put himself into both Kemp and Yeoman, and how Yeoman was partly his friend Paul Semonin.

It is worth mentioning here, however, that the character of Yeoman walks “with a long bow-legged stride.” This is Thompson subtly admitting that he is partly the basis for this character. Douglas Brinkley noted in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter Thompson that Hunter had a “bowlegged walk” and Tim Ferris, in the same book, called it a “weird bowlegged gait.” Thompson often inserted comments on his physical appearance (usually his clothing) but this is a rare occasion of him attributing it to someone other than the narrator.

The love interest Chenault was also clearly modelled to some degree on Thompson’s first wife Sandy. Personality-wise, the character is either fictional or based on someone else, but physically there is a clear resemblance and there are even photos of her from that era wearing the small white bikini Thompson describes several times in this novel. Thompson was coy about this when asked on camera during the editing of the book in the late 1990s but seemed to subtly admit the connection. Chenault went to Smith College and Thompson had a relationship with at least two women from Smith, so it’s likely Chenault was—as most of the characters were—a hybrid of several people. Another character, Bob Sala, is a composite of two reporters Thompson knew in Puerto Rico: Bob Bone and Pete Sala. Bone acknowledged this in his book, Fire Bone! (2014).

There are other instances of names, personalities, and biographical details borrowed from real life. One of these is “a man named Tyrrell” (italics in the original text), which is almost certainly a reference to Gerald Tyrrell, a boyhood friend. He is one of several characters repeatedly mentioned but never really introduced. Another is Noonan. Thompson had friends called Jimmy and Billy Noonan.

The introductory text seems to have been written years later, after the bulk of the novel, and in it Thompson writes (as Paul Kemp):

Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys. I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality.

Digging into his biography, we can see that during his first writing stint for the Command Courier at Eglin Air Force Base, he wrote for three newspapers at the same time. He also hated bowling and resented being forced to write about it at various newspapers (including during his time in Puerto Rico). At one point later, he had a falling out with a restaurateur who nearly had him fired, as well as the owner of a yacht on which he was a passenger, and that he suffered violence at the hands of the police during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. These events seem to be referenced here and slightly modified for fictional purposes.

On the first page after the intro, we learn:

My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse.

Thompson indeed lived on Perry Street and was a regular at the White Horse Tavern. A little later, after arriving in Puerto Rico, he finds a bar that reminds him of the Catskills. It was whilst living in the Catskills that Thompson had worked on his first novel, Prince Jellyfish. This may seem random and unimportant, but in both The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson would deliberately make references to places he had been, even when there was no obvious reason for them to be mentioned. This is partly what I mean by “hidden autobiography.”

This idea reoccurs when Thompson mentions Tallahassee, seemingly at random, during a fantasy scene (something uncommon in this book but very common in his later work). It seems Tallahassee was mentioned because Thompson had gone there weekly to study during his time working at Eglin Air Force Base. Other clues come with characters wanting to leave Puerto Rico by sea, heading for Europe. Thompson wanted to do the same and tried to sail for Europe, eventually going via St. Thomas and getting stuck in Bermuda (both of which are also mentioned in the book).

We hear about Columbia University at one point, with the characters Segarra and Sanderson having been there. Various of Thompson’s friends had been to Columbia and he had attended briefly but not as an undergraduate. He had taken a few literature classes there when working in New York. Later in life, he sometimes vaguely mentioned having been to Columbia, hoping that reporters would assume he was a graduate. He was sometimes embarrassed by his lack of tertiary education. Paul Kempt admits in the novel that he’d falsely claimed to have been a Yale graduate but that he’d done two years at Vanderbilt before volunteering for the military. Thompson had wanted to go to Columbia or Vanderbilt but had ended up in the Air Force.

There are references to Thompson’s South American travels, which happened after his time in Puerto Rico and after he began work on the book but long before he finished it. He says at one point:

I could see myself in Caracas and Bogota and Rio, wheeling and dealing through a world I had never seen but knew I could handle because I was a champ.

He visited all three of these places.

It may seem strange to mention grapefruit in an essay about autobiographical detail but most fans of Thompson know that he was weirdly fond of the fruit and strangely made them part of his identity. He mentioned them in The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and not only ate them frequently but carried them around as part of his Gonzo routine, bringing them out of his satchel and pretending to inject himself with the juice using a fake hypodermic needle.

There are many literary references, of course, and these are worth noting because he referred to writers with whom he was infatuated as a young man. I won’t go into detail but these are discussed at length in High White Notes. Thompson refers explicitly to Joseph Conrad and paraphrases something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Conrad. There seems to be a tribute to J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” when Kemp drunkenly rambles about being “a suckfish.” And, of course, the whole novel is basically a rewriting of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. These don’t exactly fit “hidden autobiography” except that they show elements of Thompson’s interests subtly included in a work of allegedly complete fiction.

There are many more connections between The Rum Diary and his real life but most of those get into the question of how much of the novel was based on reality, and I said I wouldn’t do that. Instead, let’s move over to his most famous book…

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Again, I will attempt to avoid the obvious and not bother to explain the connections between this story and Thompson and Acosta’s real-life exploits in Las Vegas or the events immediately prior to their departure (such as their need to flee Los Angeles). Instead, I’ll look for those more hidden autobiographical fragments.

The first such fragment is not exactly autobiographical but rather a sneaky reference to Acosta’s life. Doctor Gonzo shouts in chapter two: “One of these days I’ll toss a fucking bomb into this place!” Acosta seems to have been behind one or more bombings and Thompson evidently called for him to stop. This is discussed further in High White Notes (p.247) and Ian Lopez’s Racism on Trial (p.122). Thompson subtly alludes to this in a few other works.

Just one page later, we come to Thompson’s own admission of criminal activity:

“I’d like to get hold of some priests’ robes,” I said. “They might come in handy in Las Vegas.”

But there were no costume stores open, and we weren’t up to burglarizing a church. “Why bother?” said my attorney. “And you have to remember that a lot of cops are good vicious Catholics. Can you imagine what those bastards would do to us if we got busted all drugged-up and drunk in stolen vestments? Jesus, they’d castrate us!”

This is clearly a reference to his teenage crime spree, which I wrote about here:

The gist is that when he was a teenager, he broke into churches and vandalised the robes.

When talking about the Mint 400 race, he compares it to the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby. The Kentucky Derby was of course held in Thompson’s hometown and he’d invented Gonzo Journalism whilst covering it, and Oakland is where he’d hung with the Hell’s Angels. Note that this comes soon after a reference to the sort of motorbike the Angels rode (“a hog”), which was mentioned as being unsuitable for a dirt bike race. In this same passage, a man admits to brutally beating his wife but does not see anything wrong with it, which is another reference to his book Hell’s Angels.

Soon after this, Thompson writes—in one of the many digressions in the book—“A long time ago when I lived in Big Sur down the road from Lionel Olay…” This is one of the more obvious autobiographical fragments. He had indeed lived in Big Sur and had been friends with Olay, whom he sometimes mentioned in writing. Thompson admired Olay and wished his friend had achieved more success. The average reader would not have known Olay or the fact that Thompson had really lived at Big Sur. It was random but Thompson liked to insert such details.

There are many references to music in the book and most are not relevant here except perhaps this one:

The volume was so far up that it was hard to know what was playing unless you knew Surrealistic Pillow almost note for note… which I did, at the time, so I knew that “White Rabbit” had finished; the peak had come and gone.

Thompson had been in San Francisco in the mid-sixties and had seen Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix. He had a crush on Grace Slick and knew that album as well as he says here. Similarly, he goes on to talk about the countercultural scene of that place and time, which he knew from personal experience. He talks about Allen Ginsberg, for example, with whom he was friends. Here, the autobiographical parts are more obvious. As in The Rum Diary, he makes seemingly unnecessary references to real places he’d been and even the clothes he wore and motorbikes he’d driven:

I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket…

The jacket is not merely a reference to his own clothing but the fact that he’d spent time in and written about Butte as a young journalist. (This article got him in trouble, as he made up certain facts and quotes in order to make the city look bad.)

In the second half of the book, Duke quite randomly says, “I felt like Martin Bormann.” To those familiar with Thompson’s biography, this makes sense. He often invoked the Nazi’s name for shock value. He had used it a year before writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as part of his Freak Power campaign. It was just one of many names he used for fun, and other of these names appear in Fear and Loathing, including Yail Bloor. Again, we can consider these elements of hidden autobiography because they were insider jokes with personal meaning but would’ve seemed quite random to the average reader.

When Duke is at the DA’s drug conference, he compares the sound system to the Sky River Rock Festival, which Thompson attended and wrote about in 1968. He said the DA’s system was more like something from 1935, implying—as he did many times throughout this book—that the establishment in the US was rather like Nazi Germany.

There is a very amusing scene in the book in which Thompson overinflates the tyres of a rented car, saying that they were an experimental type developed by Sandoz. (This is a joke; hip readers would know Sandoz manufactured LSD.) He goes on to say that, with the dangerously overinflated tyres, the car

began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands.

This is again hidden autobiography and a reference to Hell’s Angels, in which he wrote:

One night in the winter of 1965 I took my own bike -- and a passenger -- over the high side on a rain-slick road just north of Oakland. I went into an obviously dangerous curve at about seventy, the top of my second gear. The wet road prevented leaning it over enough to compensate for the tremendous inertia, and somewhere in the middle of the curve I realized that the rear wheel was no longer following the front one. The bike was going sideways toward a bank of railroad tracks and there was nothing I could do except hang on. For an instant it was very peaceful. . . and then it was like being shot off the road by a bazooka, but with no noise. Neither a deer on a hillside nor a man on a battlefield ever hears the shot that kills him, and a man going over the high side on a motorcycle hears the same kind of high-speed silence. There are sparks, as the chromed steel grinds down on the road, an awful jerk when your body starts cartwheeling on the first impact. . .

Note the repeated language: “rain… over the high side… cartwheeling…” A few pages later, he references this book again by saying a waitress “might have been a Mama for the Hell’s Angels chapter in Berdoo.” Later in the book he talks about Sonny Barger and certain events related to the Angels in 1965, during which time Hunter was riding with them. Some of this is hidden autobiography; others much more obvious.

A few pages later, we come to a headline: “Bart Starr Beaten by Thugs in Chicago Tavern…” Thompson had written about this quarterback during his sports reporter days at the Command Courier. According to Thompson, Starr had colluded with a football team to weasel his way out of military service and Thompson wrote about this in the Courier. One might assume the Chicago beating is also a reference to the countless beatings Thompson witnessed in Chicago in 1968—the year he pinpoints in this book as being the death of the American Dream.

In Chapter 10, he makes reference to his time in South America for the National Observer. When trying to get Doctor Gonzo to the plane on time, he recalls being in Peru until Gonzo tells him to shut up. The events described were unlikely real but certainly he had gone through Peru a decade before writing this book and seemed keen in inserting another reference to his real life.

If that seems like a stretch—a wild assumption—then consider that soon after Thompson inserts an imagined legal document proposed in defence of his actions in Vegas. In it, he imagines fleeing to various places in Latin America as a means of stalling his trial. These were places he had in fact been—the island of Culebra, off Puerto Rico and Guajira, in northern Colombia. Also mentioned are Manaus and Rio, in Brazil. He makes references to people and languages that he learned of and wrote of during his time in South America. This is all inserted quite randomly, with no suggestion that Thompson or Duke had actually been there.

A very random reference comes when Doctor Gonzo gets in a fight with a hotel maid. He says, “Come on, baby. Don’t try to tell us you never heard of the Grange Gorman.” This reference is fairly obscure but refers to a place in Dublin that Thompson knew of through his favourite novel (at least for a period as a young man), The Ginger Man. (It is actually “Grangegorman.” For some reason, Thompson has Gonzo transform it into two words and frame it as though it were some kind of beast.) A much more obvious reference to Thompson’s interests comes immediately after, when a maid called Alice tells Duke and Gonzo to “ask for Alice.” One assumes this is another nod to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.”

I mentioned in the previous section that Thompson had Yeoman walk with “a long bow-legged stride” and Raoul Duke shares this. Thompson—who of course had the same physical characteristic—wrote near the end of FLLV that Duke walked with a “crippled, loping walk […] Because one leg is longer than the other.” As William McKeen writes in the essential Outlaw Journalist, “The shorter leg gave him a distinctive walk—more of a lope, actually—that afforded him a lifetime of memorable and dramatic entrances.”

At the end of the book, Duke is in the Rocky Mountains and does not understand why. That is where Thompson lived at the time. He decides to buy a Doberman for no apparent reason—a breed of dog Thompson owned several times in his life. He then goes to buy pharmaceuticals with his “Doctor of Divinity” card, and indeed Thompson had become a Doctor of Divinity by purchasing a mail-order certificate so that he could call himself “Doctor Thompson.”

Finally, it’s worth noting a few connections between these books. Not long after arriving in Vegas, Thompson and Acosta order rum and grapefruit. The Rum Diary obviously was filled with the former and the latter also appeared. Rum is in fact Duke’s drink of choice throughout Fear and Loathing, appearing ten times. Later, we hear that someone has been “diced up like pineapple” and throughout The Rum Diary Kemp keeps eating diced pineapple. There is probably no great significance here but it’s an interesting connection. Also, Duke appears to be from St. Louis, which was Paul Kemp’s hometown. Thompson did not want Duke or Kemp to be too obviously based on him, so he switched Louisville (his real hometown) for St. Louis.

It is no great secret that Hunter S. Thompson was a fan of Bob Dylan. In 1964, after listening to The Times They Are a-Changin’, he wrote to a close friend, saying, “I think the blood is moving in my brain again. Dylan is a goddamn phenomenon, pure gold, and mean as a snake. If you get U.S. records over there, listen to his “Masters of War” sometime.” In 1970, he said, “I’ve been arguing for the past few years that music is the New Literature, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hemingway.”

He often referred to Dylan in his letters and articles, sometimes explicitly praising him and sometimes subtly referencing lyrics, showing a deep knowledge of the singer’s work. In “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies,” for example, which he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1967, he said “I’m 22, but I used to be much older,” which is most likely a reference to Bob Dylan’s 1964 song, “My Back Pages,” and the line, “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

This essay will focus on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and explore the references that I have found in that book, which was—let’s not forget—dedicated to Dylan.

First and most obviously, the book itself was dedicated to two Bobs, the second one being Dylan, with the explanatory note “for Mister Tambourine Man.” Thompson mentioned on at least a few occasions that he admired the song and found it useful when preparing to write. He would play it loudly as a means of getting into the right frame of mind. Music was, to him, a sort of “fuel” for writing.

In the text of the book, Bob Dylan is referred to by that name twice. In both cases, Thompson was referring back to the counterculture of the 1960s and specifically its failings. First, he mentions the end of the sixties and the death of hope, with various allusions, including “Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village.” Comparing this to other events noted (the death of Robert Kennedy, for example), it seems Thompson was referring to Dylan’s disappearance from the public eye following his 1966 motorcycle accident. Later, when again talking about countercultural decline, he wrote:

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.

For Thompson, allegiance to a guru was not a positive thing. He was in the middle of criticising gurus such as Timothy Leary and went on to mock “a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to ‘God.’” He was suggesting that Dylan, as a true rebel, would not go “to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.”

Dylan is mentioned by his real name as well: Robert Zimmerman. There is a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Thompson describes a fairly innocent person who visits the city and is badly abused. This is meant to inform the reader—were it not already clear—that Vegas is suitable only for the wildly depraved. This innocent proto-hippie character is arrested and robbed, in contrast to the criminal antics of Duke and Gonzo, whose debauchery is unnoticed by the drunk and corrupt denizens of the city. This innocent person is in Thompson’s words “sort of an early Bob Zimmerman.” Later, an unpleasant character asks Duke for his name and Duke replies, “Bob Zimmerman.” The inference here is that this regressive person would not get the reference.

We can see, then, that Dylan/Zimmerman is named several times in the book, but of course those are only the most obvious references. His songs appear throughout the text as well, sometimes obviously and sometimes less obviously.

There is in fact a whole chapter named for a Dylan song. The chapter is titled “Aaawww, Mama, Can This Really Be the End? … Down and Out in Vegas, with Amphetamine Psychosis Again?” This refers to the song “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and the lyrics:

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again

It mixes in another of Thompson’s influences, George Orwell, and his book Down and Out in Paris and London. I have written about Thompson and Orwell here. You can also learn about the writers who influenced Thompson more generally here:

You can also learn about Thompson’s writing in my book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, which is by far the most detailed study of Gonzo.

In the chapter named above, Thompson imagines hearing Dylan on a jukebox:

Aaaww … Mama

can this really be the end?

No!

Who played that song? Did I actually hear that fucking thing on the jukebox just now? At 9:19 on this filthy grey morning in Wild Bill’s Tavern?

But it is only his imagination and instead the jukebox is playing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” This prompts “Flashing paranoia,” and the question, “What kind of rat-bastard psychotic would play that song—right now, at this moment?”

Following this chapter, which is a rather obvious Dylan reference, there is another: “Hellish Speed … Grappling with the California Highway Patrol … Mano a Mano on Highway 61.” The reference to “Highway 61” seems to me a nod to Dylan’s 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. In fact, “Highway 61” is mentioned again later in the book. Thompson presents it as the name of a real road but there has never been a Highway 61 near Vegas. That road runs north-south between Minnesota and Mississippi. Thompson suggests that it’s the road from Vegas to Los Angeles but that would have been Highway 91. It overlapped with Route 466, and perhaps Thompson fused these as a not-so-subtle nod to Dylan.

The book had begun with “One Took Over The Line” and it reappears in the penultimate chapter. Duke says,

I listened for a moment, but my nerve ends were no longer receptive. The only song I might have been able to relate to, at that point, was “Mister Tambourine Man.” Or maybe “Memphis Blues Again.…”

“Awww, mama … can this really … be the end … ?”

It is not the end of his references to Dylan because later in that chapter Thompson gives us another fake news bulletin. This one makes reference to “Tom Thumb’s Blues” from Highway 61 Revisited. The story sees a US military unit “diced up like pineapple” and then cremated in a bizarre funeral ritual.

Conclusion

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas makes references to many songs and musicians, some of which Thompson liked and others he hated. It is probably best remembered for Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” or even “One Toke Over The Line,”[1] songs that appear more prominently in both the book and the film, and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” is also perhaps one that comes to mind more readily than any Dylan song, but hopefully this essay has shown how Thompson’s favourite musician was not only the dedicatee of the book but was referenced quite a few times throughout.

Finally, I’ll note here that although I am a big fan of Dylan’s music, I am not an expert. I am no Dylanologist and so I have little doubt that some references have gone over my head. Let me know in the comments if I have missed anything.

[1] If you listen to the Gonzo Tapes, specifically the parts recorded during Thompson and Acosta’s Vegas trip, you can hear them actually listening to this song. They also listened to Led Zeppelin.

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Sometimes he used these names for himself, sometimes he made them to hide other people’s identities, and sometimes he just created them when he wanted to add a quote or fact to a story but could not cite a real person. Often these names were chosen because—for Thompson, at least—they sounded funny or had a hidden meaning. They seem to have stemmed from his lifelong love of pranking but also from the Gonzo philosophy of pushing people to think more carefully about what they read. Over time, they became a relatively common feature of his work.

Of course, Thompson’s most famous fake name—his alter ego in some respects—was Raoul Duke, but he used many others during his life. I’m going to list some of them here and give a little background for each of them. This won’t be an exhaustive list because I’m sure an extensive scouring of letters and faxes would turn up names he used once or twice and then abandoned. Rather, it’ll be a collection of his favourites or ones that stuck out in my mind as worth noting down. Also, I’ve tried to mention ones that refer to Thompson’s literary influences or reflect his sense of humour. I don’t feel the need to discuss the likes of Welburn Kemp and Paul Kemp, which are discussed elsewhere and are more conventional in terms of how protagonists are named. These were used in his more overtly fictional efforts anyway.

I am going to list and explain these in a somewhat chronological fashion, making this a sort of biography-by-personae. Feel free to add any others in the comment section below.

John J. Righteous Hypocrite

As a teenager, Thompson wrote a letter that was published in his high school literary society’s journal, The Spectator. It was a satirical piece that showed how he already possessed some of the quirks that he would use as a Gonzo journalist decades later. It was signed “John J. Righteous Hypocrite” and included these lines:

Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future! Do you realize that you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation?[ii]

The name was less subtle than later efforts but he was not exactly going for subtlety here. He was trying to be funny whilst also making important points. He wanted to make people think and to make them laugh.

Around this time, Thompson was known by nicknames including “Dr. Hunto” and was almost certainly behind the spate of vandalism attacks attributed to “The Wreckers.” He felt no shame about his real name but was already coming to find uses for made-up ones.

Thorne Stockton, Cuubley Cohn, and Sebastian Owl

William McKeen writes in his first biography of Hunter S. Thompson that Thompson moonlighted for another publication when on the staff of the Command Courier. In Outlaw Journalist, he mentions Cuubley Cohn as “one of his pseudonyms”[iii] and Douglas Brinkley says that Thompson wrote under the name Thorne Stockton.

The name Thorne Stockton is probably derived from Thorne Smith (a hard-drinking, controversial humourist) and Thompson’s own middle name, Stockton. Cubbley Cohn obviously refers to the poem by Coleridge. Thompson admired the poet and referred to at least one of his homes as Xanadu. Sebastian comes from the protagonist of The Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield. This was his favourite book for a while when he was young.

It is worth noting here that The Ginger Man also inspired the name Brent Dangerfield, a made-up person Thompson cited in “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital Of the Hippies.”

One final note: Thompson later used the pseudonym Aldous Miller-Mencken when trying his hand at fiction.[iv] This was a rather obvious attempt to reference three great writers: Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and H.L. Mencken. I wrote about Thompson’s literary influences here:

Lloyd Botch

I doubt many people will have heard this one but it was an early device used by Thompson. During his time at the Command Courier when he was in the Air Force, Thompson trialled many of the literary-journalistic devices that he later used to great effect. Here, he invited his readers to send him hate mail and gave a fake name and address. As was often the case when he made things up, Thompson hoped his readers would get the joke. The name “Lloyd Botch” was to him unbelievable and amusing.

Manmountain Dense and Munnington Thurd

At the start of The Great Shark Hunt, the first collection of Thompson’s writings, we have a news release Thompson allegedly submitted upon leaving the Air Force. It fictionalises his departure from Eglin Air Force base and refers to these two invented individuals. The names are deliberately absurd and fit with Thompson’s sense of humour at the time.

Boeboe

After leaving the Air Force, which meant no longer working for the Command Courier and Playground News, Thompson bounced around the US attempting to find employment at various newspapers and trying his hand at fiction. Eventually, he set off for South America and worked at the newly established National Observer. He sent numerous dispatches to his amused editors in the US, who knew that what he reported was not 100% accurate but struggled to prove it. They edited his work to take out some of the stylistic flair but much of his writing was so good they just ran it regardless. It also helped that the publication had not yet developed it own style.

The first piece of Thompson’s that ran in the National Observer was about Aruban politics and was pretty much a short story that he passed off as news. He created characters representing political ideas and presented their dialogue. (I’ve written before about how he was inspired in this regard by George Orwell.) One of these characters was called “Boeboe.” Thompson explains in the article that it “is a Paplamento-language nickname for a family’s eldest son.”[v]

Thompson used the nickname “Bobo” for his friend Paul Semonin and then later reused it in Hell’s Angels for his press contact Birney Jarvis. He returned to this in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 when he needed a sidekick device to better explain concepts to the reader, so he created Bobo the Pimp.

In this story, Thompson also channels Ernest Hemingway (another of his major influences at this time) but referring to himself as “the sportswriter” and “the American.” In the photo, which you can see above, he refers to “A tourist” even though it is clearly Thompson. Elsewhere, at roughly the same stage in his career, he called himself “the columnist” and “the Spectator.” There are many other examples of him using this device.

Claude Fink

Thompson often used what he thought was a funny name when creating a fictional source in his pre-Gonzo journalism, then he would repeat this name later in another context, thus revealing that the original was fake. Thompson probably wanted his original reader to question the first use but at the same time he would’ve thought it was funny if they didn’t. Claude Fink is one such example. The name appears in a wonderful article called “Big Sur: The Garden of Agony” (which went by another name when originally published, but this was Thompson’s intended title). The quote cited here was silly enough that presumably no one thought it was real:

Ah ha! So you’re Henry Miller! Well, my name is Claude Fink and I’ve come to join the cult of sex and anarchy.[vi]

Thompson seems to have been working on the character of Claude Fink in 1961. Fink is mentioned in a letter to a literary agent and also in a note to Paul Semonin. To the latter, Thompson said he was working on a “Claude Fink series.”

I am not sure where Thompson came up with “Claude” exactly, but clearly “Fink” comes from the noun that could be partially defined as “an unpleasant or contemptible person.” This sort of word, used in a name, was amusing for Thompson.

Raoul Duke

It is not entirely obvious exactly when Thompson first adopted the name Raoul Duke but certainly it appeared in Hell’s Angels and there is no written record of it before that. Perhaps we will find something in his early letters but I doubt it. When I was researching High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, I discovered that the name “Raoul Duke” appeared in a newspaper that Thompson read when researching Hell’s Angels, suggesting that he found it there and borrowed it.

Thompson first used Raoul Duke as a made-up name that he found funny and then gave it as a source. His writing from 1968 shows that he was trying to use Duke for literary-journalistic purposes that year but it was another few years before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas brought Duke to the public’s attention. Thompson partially treated Duke as a character and partially considered it a sort of pseudonym. Eventually, Thompson and Duke became rather confused and he was trying to move beyond it by the late sixties.

I wrote in much more detail about the name Raoul Duke for The Millions in this 2021 essay.

Sr. Cazador

Thompson mentioned Duke in Hell’s Angels but there are other made-up names there, including Sr. Cazador. This is not a hugely significant name except that Thompson included it because he simply wanted to say something and felt it would be more notable if he attributed to someone else. He took a line from an early draft of the article on which the book was based and then re-used it by having it said by this made-up person. The line was:

In a prosperous democracy that is also a society of winners and losers, any man without an equalizer or at least the illusion of one is by definition underprivileged.[vii]

This also appears in a letter in Proud Highway. Clearly, he was fond of the sentence and wanted to include it, which is why he invented this name. Google Translate tells me that the word is Spanish for “hunter,” so quite possibly he thought it was an amusing way to cite himself: “Señor Hunter.”

Jefferson Rank

In 1967, after coming up with Raoul Duke and before incorporating Duke into his writing in any major sense, Thompson joked about writing under another pseudonym. To Paul Krassner, he wrote:

Anyway, for a good many reasons I can’t explain, I’ve been writing a completely different piece for you (sort of an extra), but for the same kind of reasons I’m writing it under a phony name. Jefferson Rank. The local vigilantes would croak me if they knew. And the hippies might do worse. They’re moving in, huge tribes, bent on taking over the county. Death stalks the back roads: people are being torn apart and jammed in unmarked graves. It’s a secret civil war. And Jefferson Rank is on the scene, absorbing the whole story—wild shrieks in the night, dog packs, flutes screaming in unison, ugly behavior. There may be a story in it. I’ll get the other first, but keep this one in mind. It will scare the shit out of any hippie who plans on a trip back to the land. The siege of Woody Creek will go down in history as the Watershed of Dope. Take my word for it … or rather the word of … Jefferson Rank.[viii]

Clearly he found this amusing and it’s important to note it here because it predates Raoul Duke by one year. Yes, he had come up with the name Raoul Duke in 1965 but he only used it as a fake reference in Hell’s Angels. He would begin writing about and under the name Raoul Duke in 1968 but here we can clearly see an interest in creating an alter ego of sorts.

What does it mean exactly? Well, Jefferson could be a reference to Thomas Jefferson, of course, whom Thompson admired… or Jefferson Airplane… or even to Jefferson County Jail, where he was incarcerated in high school. Rank probably just fit with Fink and Blotch and Bloor as silly-sounding surnames.

Doctor Gonzo

Although Thompson called himself a doctor and was the inventor of Gonzo, the name Doctor Gonzo of course refers to Oscar Zeta Acosta. Acosta famously wanted to be known as one of the two lead characters in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but Thompson—supposedly for Acosta’s own protection—made him into Doctor Gonzo. According to the audio tapes from that trip, Acosta in fact referred to himself as Doctor Gonzo, so he was at least comfortable with the name.

Yail Bloor

Since we are talking about sidekicks, Yail Bloor was another of Thompson’s fake names for people who assisted him in his stories. It first appeared as Doctor Bloor in a 1963 letter and then later as Yail Bloor or Yail Bloor III (perhaps yet another joke at the expense of Paul Semonin III or perhaps just an elite-sounding name to lampoon) in his various writings. The name seems to be a reference to Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor. That 1963 letter was sent to Semonin and Thompson was making fun of his Marxist politics. However, in spite of the reference to Semonin, it was Thompson’s friend Michael Solheim who was called Yail Bloor in “The Great Shark Hunt.” There are also two references to people called “Bloor” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Sidenote: It was to “Herr Bloor” that Thompson attributed the famous expression, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”[ix]

Martin Bormann

The use of “Herr” naturally brings to mind Nazism. Or at least it does in the context of Hunter S. Thompson’s outrageous letters. Thompson loved to shock and so he sometimes drew upon the evils of Nazism for this purpose.

Martin Bormann of course is not a fake name… but it is a name Hunter Thompson borrowed. It belonged to a Nazi who died in 1945 but whom some believed had escaped to Argentina. His remains were only found in 1972, a few years after Thompson began using his name in letters to his local newspaper. Thompson did not usually pretend to be Bormann but rather said he was writing on behalf of the Nazi and satirically wrote in support of Sheriff Earl Whitmire as a means of portraying the sheriff as a fascist. On at least one occasion, he wrote as “Martin ‘Bing’ Bormann.” He invoked Bormann for similar purposes in other political capacities. According to McKeen (who is on Substack now), Thompson would use the name Martin Bormann when he stayed in certain hotels.

For more on Thompson’s campaign, see the incredible Freak Power by DJ Watkins.

Gene Skinner

After Thompson grew bored of the Raoul Duke persona, he created Gene Skinner. This was intended as a character for The Silk Road, a novel he planned but never completed. Parts can be read in Songs of the Doomed. Skinner was meant as a sort of updated Duke—“a freak for the eighties.”[x] He was a lot less fun than Duke and more representative of the poisonous values skewered in Generation of Swine. In The Silk Road, it sometimes seems as though Skinner was an extension of Thompson but sometimes very much a different character. To be fair, it was a confused effort and Thompson’s notes show he was trying to rewrite The Great Gatsby (again) but did not really know how it would all come together. The characters are not well delineated and had he pushed it further it seems one would have been based on Thompson in the Nick Carraway role and Skinner would have been a 1980s version of Jay Gatsby. The word “Skinner” most likely was used to show the character’s violent nature. This is purely speculative but I wonder if “Gene” came from Gene Espeland, a friend of Thompson’s in the 1950s. Thompson wrote quite a few stories about their escapades when he was starting out as a journalist. He took a fairly normal man and exaggerated him for the sake of comical, absurd stories.

F.X. Leach

After Duke and Skinner came Leach. Thompson used this persona in several works, including “The Death of a Poet” and “Fear and Loathing in Elko.” In the latter, we are told “Leach is a monster, a criminal hermit who understands nothing in life except point spreads. He should be locked up and castrated.”[xi] The character was not exactly a Thompson alter ego but Thompson did write things and sign the name as he had done with Duke, including a rare late-career poem. Also, the Wild Turkey-swilling writer undeniably resembles Thompson in certain ways, so as with the earlier personae, there is some degree of confusion.

One possible interpretation of this name, given Thompson’s disgust by the money-driven yuppies of the era, is that “F.X.” comes from “foreign exchange” and was thus a parody of the investment scene. Those people were leeches in Thompson’s mind.

[i] Proud Highway, p.617

[ii] Proud Highway, p.5

[iii] Outlaw Journalist, p.39

[iv] Outlaw Journalist, p.39

[v] National Observer, July 16, 1962

[vi] Proud Highway, p.267

[vii] Hell’s Angels, p.93

[viii] Proud Highway, p.617

[ix] Fear and Loathing in America, p.612

[x] When the Going Gets Weird, p.270

[xi] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/fear-and-loathing-in-elko-34374/

Yesterday, the investigation—conducted by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation—ended and it was determined that Thompson had indeed killed himself. This was announced in various news outlets, including the AP. Apparently, new information had come to light but the investigators did not publicly say what this was. They did, however, announce that Thompson’s body “was not moved or ‘staged’ after death” and that there was nothing suspicious about his death. The AP reported:

CBI said interviews with family members and the original investigators confirmed that Thompson suffered from significant depression and chronic pain at the time of his death. Pitkin County coroner Dr. Steven Ayers noted that he was in physical and mental decline and idolized author Ernest Hemingway, who also died by suicide, it said.

“All speculative theories could not be substantiated,” CBI said.

Indeed, Thompson’s physical and mental state in his final years have been pretty well documented since his death and it is not surprising that he took his own life. He had famously told people in advance that he would one day kill himself, so the results of the investigation can hardly be a shock. The question is: Why was this investigation opened in the first place?

About a week ago, an article appeared in the New York Times that offered some degree of explanation for why this all happened now, two decades after his suicide. Titled “Did Hunter S. Thompson Really Kill Himself?” the article looks at the family feud that has caused so much damage to Thompson’s legacy and points to the relationship between Thompson’s widow, Anita, and his son, Juan, as the reason for the inquiry.

Many people close to Thompson were interviewed for the article but Anita refused and so her motivations are drawn from the words of others, as well as from evidence collected by the reporter, Tim Arango. He wrote:

Around the same time last year, [Anita] also heard from someone close to Hunter’s son, Juan, who was at Owl Farm with his then-wife, Jennifer Winkel, the evening Hunter died. In a text message reviewed by The New York Times, Anita told the former sheriff that the ex-wife of Juan and Jennifer’s son was claiming that Jennifer had over the years said that Hunter’s death had to be made to “look like a suicide,” suggesting there’d been a coverup.

There aren’t many more reasons given but a column in the Aspen Daily News lent some support to the idea that perhaps there had been some irregularities:

I have the original police report from the investigation of Hunter’s death and my sources say there are genuine issues remaining: hints of handwritten, last-minute wills; the security of the crime scene; photos that have since surfaced; and genuine questions about who was where when the fatal shot rang in the kitchen. This is not to say I believe there was a cover-up or a conspiracy.

The New York Times piece, though, highlights the fractured relationship between Juan (Thompson’s son) and Anita, suggesting that the investigation is more a result of the family feud than any legitimate doubts over how Thompson’s death was initially dealt with:

Almost from the moment Hunter was laid to rest, his widow and his son began to feud, over everything from the future of Owl Farm to Juan’s belief that his father had been mistreated by Anita in his last days.

The estrangement deepened with time, and now, Anita’s suspicions have taken the feud to a more pointed place, revealing a long, bitter fight over the legacy of the man who pioneered the personal, participatory style of reporting known as gonzo journalism.

Juan is quoted as saying, “I do not know why she raised this. And I can’t imagine that the C.B.I. would find anything to act on.” That seems to be an opinion shared by everyone I’ve spoken to.

Now, almost four months later, it seems the CBI indeed found nothing. Thompson’s death was a suicide. Case closed (again). Although Anita has said nothing to the media, she was quoted in the CBI’s announcement. From the AP:

In a statement included in the announcement, Anita Thompson thanked the bureau for its “kind and thorough work.”

“This allows all of us who loved Hunter to move forward with a clean conscience,” she said.

It is a strange and sad episode and also another disappointment. The bickering behind the scenes has been detrimental to Thompson’s literary legacy. I wrote on the anniversary of his death last year that the Thompson estate has done next to nothing except for the occasional moneygrab. We’ve had no third volume of letters, no previously unpublished works, no opening his archives to scholars… All we get are Gonzo gin, Gonzo whisky, Gonzo jewellery, Gonzo Airbnb listings… It is a damn shame.

Thankfully, there was good news last year when a Thompson collector began donating material to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. (More on that here.) I don’t hold out much hope for any action from the Thompson estate but maybe with this ugliness behind us something might happen. Hell, they can’t do less than they already have, can they?

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The CBI’s announcement is here. It is currently giving a 403 message likely due to unusually high traffic.

Although Thompson was the prime suspect in 1954, it was only in the early 1990s, with the release of several biographies, that his name became publicly attached to these crimes. Peter O. Whitmer’s biography, When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life of Hunter S. Thompson, cites a few sources among Thompson’s teenage friend group. First up is Sam Stallings, Jr.:

I knew I didn’t do it. I didn’t think Hunter did it either, but there was a lot of vandalism in churches at the time. Horrible damage. Probably twenty churches. Thousands of dollars. It was crazy. The culprits kept leaving notes calling themselves, “The Wreckers.” There was one detective downtown—Dotson […] And he thought Hunter and I did it. I’ll bet you they had us down there twenty times, taking our handwriting, grilling us. It was cops-and-robbers, and it went on and on.[i]

Stallings exaggerates here. It was not 20 churches, nor were he and Thompson taken in for questioning 20 times. In Paul Perry’s biography (which came out a year earlier), Stallings admits that it was “several times.”[ii] In the Whitmer book, he goes on to talk about generally doing bad things and drinking too much whisky but does not return to the topic of the Wreckers; however, another friend, Larry Jelsma, is asked about the “bizarre” acts of vandalism and he says, “That sounds like Hunter.”

Another friend, Gerald Tyrell, told E. Jean Carroll about the Wreckers and said, “There was a lieutenant on the police force shadowed Hunter for a year. But he couldn’t pin it on him. To this day nobody knows if Hunter was the Wrecker.”[iii] Carroll put the question to Thompson, who simply replied, “Call the AAA or ask Robin Leach.”

In Corey Seymour’s oral biography, Gonzo, collected many years later, another childhood friend comments on the crime spree. This was Neville Blakemore and he told Seymour:

As Hunter got older, the stuff he did seemed to get more and more serious. You might say it switched from pranks to vandalism. There was a group that called themselves the Wreckers—I’ve always suspected Hunter was one of them, but it was never proven—that was behind two serious vandalism incidents in the east end of town. One of them was at Louisville Collegiate School, where they got in and tore the place up as much as they could. And then they vandalized the Highland Presbyterian church—they broke in and cut off the left sleeves of all the choir robes, among other things, and they left a note: “We’re the Wreckers, and we’re here to cause trouble.” Hunter was suspected, and this detective on the Louisville police force, Dodson, (sic) was assigned to the case.[1] Someone even put a fake ad in the Athenaeum Spectator that read, “Dodson Is Watching.”[iv]

The best of the biographies, William McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist, does not mention the Wreckers but lists many other of Thompson’s teenage activities that sound similar and make him sound like Louisville’s Most Wanted. “When schools, gas stations, or pool halls were trashed, the cops knocked on his door first. Once, he even robbed a collection box at a neighborhood church.”[v]

So, was Thompson guilty? Let’s look further into the story…

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The Wreckers’ Crime Spree

With Thompson’s friends uncertain of his involvement and nothing about the crimes in his later published writings, we must turn to contemporary descriptions of the vandalism and look for clues.

In mid-March 1954, the Crescent Hill area of Louisville was targeted by vandals. First they hit the local library, smashing a microfiche machine and stealing library cards, which they spread across the local area. The fact that books were not damaged but merely scattered suggests the sort of respect for literature that is unusual among vandals. After that, they broke into the Crescent Hill Woman’s Club and did thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, particularly to the plumbing, but it also seems that anything that could be smashed was smashed. According to the police, it was likely a group of young boys who perpetrated the crime.

These acts of vandalism were not initially credited to the Wreckers and there was nothing obviously to connect Hunter Thompson to the crimes except that he lived very nearby, in the Cherokee Park area. Also, knowing his later love of abusing fire extinguishers, it is hard not to overlook the fact that these were used in the Women’s Club break-in. Patrolman Clifton Baird also said later that the Wreckers’ crimes were extremely similar to this first wave and that the same people were probably responsible.

It was two months later that the crime spree resumed and this time the group gave itself a name: The Wreckers. I wonder if this had something to do with the Courier-Journal’s headline from March: “Woman’s Club is Wrecked by Vandals.”[vi]

On May 23, the Courier-Journal reported:

Vandals who called themselves “The Wreckers” damaged property and seven rooms of the Louisville Collegiate School Friday night.

Then, about 1 a.m., they telephoned one of the school’s teachers, Miss Elizabeth Sterling […] and said: “We just wrecked your school.”

School officials and police found papers and books strewn about, a pair of curtains torn down, three leather chairs slashed, and one sleeve cut off each of about eight coats hanging in a hall. […]

An office typewriter was smashed, and contents of a fire extinguisher had been sprayed on an office rug.[vii]

The last paragraph brings to mind the following images…

Of course, this does not constitute hard evidence of Thompson’s guilt, but one can see why people who knew him had their suspicions.

On May 30, the Courier-Journal reported that the Wreckers had struck again. Having hit a library, a woman’s club, and four schools, they now targeted churches. This time, instead of calling a teacher, they phoned the police and alerted them to their crimes. Two churches were vandalised, one at 1am and the other at 2am, with the second church notably being quite close to Thompson’s home.

It seems now the criminals were getting bolder and at the same time eager to move beyond the distinction of mere juvenile delinquents. In addition to calling the police, they left messages. “We are just wreckers… not thieves,” they wrote. “We wreck just for excitement.”[viii] Oddly, they listed nine of their previous crimes and made clear to disavow one instance of vandalism that was not their work.

Newspaper reports made light of the fact that the messages were “taunting” and “obscene” but at the same time police recognised that the vandals were unexpectedly literate and managed to spell words correctly. They were confident that the culprit was “an educated person.” Even on the phone, the person who called in the crime and took credit sounded “cultured.” He sounded like a white man of about 25 years of age, a detective said. “He did not sound like a juvenile at all. He did not sound gleeful, and he was calm. But he sounded cocksure of himself. He asked me if I had heard about their activities.”[ix]

Even if the vandals had not taken credit by phone and with a written message, it was clear these were the same culprits. Although they did $2,500 worth of damage, it wasn’t totally mindless. The same patterns appeared, with plumbing targeted and also clothing. Once again, a fire extinguisher was discharged and leather chairs were slashed. Books were once again scattered but not destroyed.

By this point, the Wreckers were a public menace and even the mayor of Louisville was eager to stop them. The priest at Douglass Boulevard Church even went as far as to say, “If I ever catch any of these people, I may forget I’m a preacher.”[x]

The May 30 story appeared on the front page of the Courier-Journal, and the newspaper continued on May 31 with a piece by Don Freeman, who interviewed a number of psychologists in an attempt to understand what kind of person would vandalise schools and churches.

Dr. Louis M. Foltz speculated that it was “an individual who is frustrated or powerless in the normal walks of life [and therefore] is trying through abnormal ways to be successful or powerful. Dr. John D. Trawick said it “may be a repressed soul whose acts of vandalism may satisfy him in a perverted sexual way.”[xi] This sort of person, he said, often commits acts of arson and sometimes ends up as a rapist. Ultimately, it is something done by a person who is feels a sense of “rejection by society.” Other psychologists expressed an interest in studying the guilty parties after they were caught but declined to speculate. (Perhaps of interest here is the fact that this article sat next to a grinning photo of Vice-President Richard Nixon…)

Louisville had no shortage of vandalism incidents to investigate, with 3,053 making it to court in 1954 and some days seeing as many as 99 incidents reported, but none of them quite got under the skin of the authorities like the Wreckers’ crimes. Altogether, 85 police officers were assigned to catch them,[xii] and their crimes continued to be mentioned in news articles the following year. In February 1955, the police again asked the public for help catching the group’s leader, whom they called “a controlled psychopath… and dangerous,”[xiii] but there had been no new crimes since the ones detailed above.

The Wreckers’ spree, along with other more arbitrary and limited acts of vandalism, caused much public debate about juvenile delinquency, but it seems that the Wreckers quietly retired. Thompson was a prime suspect and was brought in for questioning a number of times but he was never charged. His name did not make the newspapers… at least not until a year later, when he was finally thrown in jail for a different crime. That was an event mentioned in all the books about his life, a pivotal moment of shame and humiliation.

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The Wreckers Return?

In March 1955, the case seemed to be closed at long last. The front page of the Courier-Journal noted that three young boys had dumped powdered milk on the floor of a classroom during a break-in at a local school and had subsequently been tracked down due to the police tracing their footprints. On one classroom wall, the police found pieces of paper glued. The paper had various slogans written on it, including “The Wreckers Strike Again!” and “The Wreckers, Ha, Ha!”[xiv] It was one week shy of one year since the Wreckers’ first strike… Had they come back to terrorise Louisville once again?

It didn’t take the police long to realise that these young boys were not the original Wreckers but in fact just copycats. They quickly admitted to a string of vandalism incidents but denied being behind the 1954 incidents, and the police believed them even though it would’ve looked good to finally punish someone. The boys were all 14 and 15 years old and seemed destructive but lacking in the creative element that marked the Wreckers’ spree. They mostly wasted food and set small fires that quickly burned out. They also discharged a fire extinguisher, possibly emulating the real Wreckers.

In June 1955, Hunter S. Thompson was arrested and sent to jail, but not explicitly for the crimes committed by the Wreckers. This event is well documented, so I shan’t go into detail here, but in June 1955, Thompson was out with a group of friends and together they robbed a young couple. All of the perpetrators were caught but only Thompson went to jail, ultimately missing his high school graduation. Even the victims pleaded for leniency, saying that of the three young men responsible, Thompson had tried to help them and stop the robbery, but the police, a probation officer, and a judge all knew Thompson as a young hellraiser who had escaped justice many times before for crimes including “destruction of property.” They had the chance to punish him now and they were going to take it. He was sent to County Jail for 60 days.

In late 1956, the Wreckers seemed to strike again but it appears to have been yet another copycat incident. On October 1, it was reported that a vandal scrawled “The Wreckers—we’re at it again!” on a blackboard at Henry Clay School. Few details were given and it seems unlikely that this was the original gang getting back together, though it’s not impossible. If it was, though, then Hunter Thompson certainly was not part of it. He was by this point in the US Air Force at Eglin, at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and it does not appear he got back to Louisville in late September. He was not exactly on the straight and narrow, but he had moved past his days as a juvenile delinquent and was now a journalist. His creative capacity and destructive tendencies would find different outlets.

Weighing the Evidence

If you’ve read any of the various Hunter S. Thompson biographies or High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, you’ll know that the above crimes fit perfectly with his personality as a teenager. Even if we put aside the fact that his friends often felt he might have been guilty, and the fact that he was the police’s prime suspect, it is not hard to see that the crimes fit with his interests at that time.

The young Hunter Thompson was a frustrated, angry, destructive force. He was charismatic and seemed to be a natural leader, so that boys often gravitated towards him and then ended up getting in trouble after he pushed them to do things, such as shoplifting or participating in complex pranks to shock the public. Many parents barred their children from socialising with him. He came from a relatively poor family and struggled with his father’s death and his mother’s alcoholism, which exacerbated his behavioural problems. By all accounts, he was routinely in trouble for drinking, theft, arson, vandalism, and various other crimes. Even when there were no legal consequences, he was usually in trouble or had gotten someone else into trouble for carrying out his plans. The newspaper accounts of his 1955 court case show that the authorities were eager to finally give him some kind of jail sentence as a means of punishing him for earlier crimes.

In the same way he pushed journalism to its limits later in life, he pushed petty crime to extremes in Louisville. His biographies are filled with tales of his shenanigans but they always stress that for all his destructive power, he was usually creative and weird. He burned and smashed and stole and shocked people, but he tried to do it all in original ways. He had a combination of intelligence and creativity and anger that tended to express itself in unique ways, such as staging fake kidnappings or pretending to lash a friend with a whip in a public place in broad daylight. This is probably why people thought he was behind these crimes, which were not the usual mindless acts of vandalism and seemed to betray some degree of thought. Cutting one arm of the sleeve of each item of clothing is a good example.

It’s obviously impossible to assign guilt with 100% certainty, but the evidence certainly points to Thompson. The crimes committed by the Wrecker(s) were destructive but it was not the usual mindless teenage stupidity. They wanted attention and were making some kind of point, so they did it in brazen, confusing ways. The acts seem symbolic somehow and they seem to have been perpetrated by someone who was more literate than your typical teenage hoodlum. The self-confident adult voice of the person who called it in is also consistent with accounts of Hunter Thompson as a teenager. The fact that they occurred in the middle of the night of course sits well with the lifelong night owl. “He often stayed out all night long,” his younger brother recalled, while their “mother would sit up [getting] very worried.”[xv]

Did he target libraries as a means of getting back at his librarian mother, whose alcoholism he abhorred? Did he attack schools because of his hatred of formal education? Did he scatter but not destroy books because he wanted to aggravate people but held literature sacred? Did he go after churches as a thumb in the eye of upper-class Louisville society, which he felt rejected him? Did he toy with the police to show his intelligence and lack of respect for authority? All of it is possible. All of it fits with accounts of the teenage Hunter Thompson so well that it seems highly likely to me that he was behind this. He had the means and the motivation and we know from other accounts that he perpetrated similar crimes. It’s all circumstantial but it fits too well to ignore.

One obvious way to decide would be analysing the handwriting from the church wall but it’s hard to say definitively one way or another whether it was Hunter who wrote it. I have compared it against many inscriptions from decades later and there are definitely similarities in how certain letters are written but then there are also differences. Altogether, it’s hard to feel confident comparing the all-caps wall-writing of a teenager with book inscriptions from decades later but perhaps someone more qualified than myself could say, or perhaps there are earlier documents that may be illuminating.

My suspicion is that Thompson absolutely was the Wrecker or the leader of the Wreckers. I think he got a thrill from committing these crimes but was smart enough back off after it became front-page news (which was quite possibly his aim in the first place). Also, as his friends said, he became closely scrutinised by the police and quite possibly would not have been able to continue. Thompson wrote in Kingdom of Fear that he knew from an early age that the cops (or FBI agents) may well suspect you of a crime, but if they cannot prove it, then there’s not much they can do about it. Indeed, he probably put this knowledge to good use in his brief time as Louisville’s notorious vandal, but a year later they got him on a different charge and made sure he was locked up. They freely admitted that his punishment was more for prior crimes than the present one, but never was he formally charged as being the Wrecker.

**UPDATE: I was re-reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas recently and noting all the little autobiographical details Thompson subtly included, pointing to little-known parts of his past, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an admission, two decades later, of his guilt:

“I’d like to get hold of some priests’ robes,” I said. “They might come in handy in Las Vegas.” But there were no costume stores open, and we weren’t up to burglarizing a church.

Notes

[1] This was Captain Carl Dotson, of the Crime Prevention Bureau. He was tasked with reducing teenage crime in the city.

[i] When the Going Gets Weird, p.58

[ii] Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson, p.20

[iii] Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, p.50

[iv] Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, p.17

[v] Outlaw Journalist, p.17

[vi] Courier-Journal, March 18, 1954, p.17

[vii] Courier-Journal, May 23, 1954, p.10

[viii] Courier-Journal, May 30, 1954, p.1

[ix] Courier-Journal, May 30, 1954, p.8

[x] Courier-Journal, May 30, 1954, p.8

[xi] Courier-Journal, May 31, 1954, p.27

[xii] Courier-Journal, Jan 2, 1955, p18

[xiii] Courier-Journal, Feb 13, 1955, p.46

[xiv] Courier-Journal, March 8, 1955, p.1

[xv] Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, p.51

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The year 2010 was a strange and eventful one for me. At the start of the year, I was working in South Korea but in the summer I was forced to make a sudden departure. I did not have another job lined up but I had some money in the bank and decided to drop in on some old friends in the United States, where I had worked for a few months back in 2007. I boarded a flight from Incheon International Airport headed for San Francisco but shortly after taking off there was a big explosion and one of the engines fell off the plane, causing it to drop out of the sky. After much drama, we made an emergency landing in Japan and I got to California some days later, then headed for Colorado to meet up with Wayne Ewing, director of various films about Hunter S. Thompson.

At the time, I had no expectation of visiting Owl Farm. Thompson had been a hero of mine since my teenage years and I had written a few things about him, so of course I knew all about his so-called “fortified compound” in Woody Creek. It was not a place where fans were exactly encouraged to show up and I respected that. I knew his widow, Anita, lived there and I was probably aware that they required security measures to stop drugged-up freaks getting on the property as part of misguided pilgrimages. I was just keen to see Wayne and catch up. I did not dare entertain the thought of actually going anywhere near the “fortified compound.”

I cannot recall what happened but somewhere between Denver and Glenwood Springs there had been yet more travel troubles and so when I stepped off the bus several hours late, my first words to Wayne were, “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No, it’s alright,” he replied. “Actually, you’re just in time. Anita just called me… She’s having a little get-together at Owl Farm tonight and said you’re more than welcome to come along.”

I attempted to stifle any overt signs of excitement and said something like “Oh yeah? That sounds cool,” in order to make it seem like it was no big deal. Inside, of course, a Gonzo fanboy was screaming with joy.

We hopped into Wayne’s big car and took off south towards Woody Creek. Wayne explained that he’d recently moved away from Thompson’s neighbourhood, but that his house was on the way, and that we’d have time to stop in and dump my bags. The “little get-together” was scheduled to start in an hour. He also explained that it would be broadcast live on local TV. We were supposed to talk about local politics as part of something called “The Gonzo Foundation.”

There was a brief stop at the Ewing homestead. I don’t remember much but according to my notes I consumed several “Korean Valiums,” which probably contributed to my later poor memory. I don’t recall why I had these pills but I do remember taking a lot of them before the second attempt at a trans-Pacific flight. I was understandably a tad nervous after the explosion and crash landing. In this case, though, I was feeling a lot of nerves at the prospect of visiting a place that loomed large in my imagination—a place I’d read about hundreds of times. I am not an outgoing person and I knew I was about to be surrounded by people—some of whom I’d read about in Thompson’s books—and possibly put in front of a TV camera. The thought terrified me. Also, I became acutely aware of a tattoo on my left forearm. I’d gotten it about 2-3 years earlier in Korea. I wanted to come across as a serious scholar of Gonzo and I was afraid the tattoo would make me look like the Gonzo fanboy I tried to hide beneath the surface. But alas I had left Korea with a small bag that contained nothing with long sleeves.

According to my notes, it was less than an hour after meeting Wayne that we pulled into the driveway at Owl Farm. In spite of the Valium, I was so beset by nerves that I felt like a scared child. I remember waiting for Wayne to open his door first before I stepped out, worried that someone would say, “Hey, who the hell are you? Who invited this kid with the Gonzo tattoo? Get the fuck out of here!” When he opened his door, I opened mine and stepped out. I looked at the cabin I knew so well from his books and from Wayne’s films and various photographs. I tried to enjoy this moment but really I was filled with a stupid sense of fear.

Perhaps my paranoia stemmed from something else. Back in 2010, medical marijuana was legal in Colorado. I was no stranger to weed but I had never had the sort of high-grade stuff that is so common today. The weed I’d grown up with was child’s play compared to what they had in Colorado, and between getting off the bus and arriving at Owl Farm, I had gotten my first taste. Coupled with a case of altitude sickness and the onset of the Valium, it hit me pretty damn hard and, looking back, it is no wonder my memory of that night is so hazy.

I was soon standing on the porch, awkwardly positioned in the middle of a group of men as Wayne introduced me. I would rather have skulked awkwardly in a corner but Wayne told everyone I was a magazine editor who’d come from Scotland by way of Korea and had only recently walked away from a minor plane crash. This naturally resulted in a great number of questions but for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, I struggled to respond. I wish I had been more talkative and formed good relationships with these people, but the paranoia and cottonmouth were upon me in a bad way. I simply stood swigging from beer after beer, mumbling a few words in response to each question put my way. I hoped the beer would counteract the weed or give me a bit of confidence, but it only added to my intoxication. I don’t know whether I looked like an idiot, a painfully shy young man, or just a stoned kid who’d somehow ended up at Owl Farm.

My awkward mumbling came to an end when we were asked to go inside. Wayne said, “Hey, why don’t you take a seat down front? It’ll get you the best view,” and soon I was sitting front and centre in the living room. I was terrified that someone would ask me a question or that I’d puke on live TV.

Then Anita—who had been absent during the outside conversation—appeared with a giant bottle of whisky. (It was Chivas Regal if I recall correctly.) I’d never seen such a bottle in all my years of alcohol abuse. She told everyone that a few shots would help us “loosen up,” but I was plenty loose already and worried about slipping into unconsciousness. But when in Hunter Thompson’s home, one does not refuse a drink.

During the lively debate, everyone spoke but me. The camera kept turning my way to focus on the talkative Wayne, who was hidden behind me. When it did, I simply stared dead ahead and tried to look alert. Years later, I actually found the footage online and it was painful to watch. Granted, it was all about local politics and I was merely a foreigner on a brief visit, but in the video it is obvious how much I don’t want to be seen. Here’s a screenshot of me.

When the debate ended, I needed to pee. By this point, many beers had been consumed and I’d been sitting for quite some time. Wayne said the bathroom was through the house, so I wandered through and as it was occupied I was forced to wait… in the kitchen. Fans of Thompson’s will know that for him the most sacred place on earth was the kitchen at Owl Farm. It was where he “held court.” It was where he did his writing and where he shot himself. I knew his kitchen intimately from his stories and photos and Wayne’s movies. The kitchen, above all else, is what HST fans dream of seeing.

The kitchen was the center of life at Owl Farm and it was the engine room for Hunter’s literary Juggernaut.

— Michael Cleverly & Bob Braudis, The Kitchen Readings

It had been left, I found, as a memorial to him. His typewriter sat in front of his chair, the posters and stickers on the wall. Everything said that he was alive and well and still sat there from time to time.

By the time I stepped outside into the fresh mountain air—with another bottle of beer—I was feeling far better. The nerves had all but gone, the beer and weed were having no more than the usual effect, and I was feeling talkative. I spoke to George Stranahan (whose Flying Dog beer I was drinking) and Michael Owlsey (the local politician who’d been invited to the debate). I even spoke to Anita for some time and found her to be a very friendly and hospitable person. As we spoke, I tried to shield my Gonzo tattoo from view but it was prominent enough that this proved impossible. Rather than laugh or sneer or make a condescending remark, she complimented it and showed me her own tattoo with the same design.

When Wayne said we had to go for a drink at the Woody Creek Tavern, Anita hugged me and said, “Thanks for coming, David. You’re always welcome at Owl Farm.” I have no idea if she remembers that but I certainly do. I have not been back since then—not to Owl Farm nor even to Colorado. Perhaps I will get there again one day… and hopefully a bit more sober.

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I will not have time for a trip out West, but I will be in the U.S. next summer for Gonzofest. That takes place in New York in July. There are details on the official website.

For the average fan, this does not matter much. They will always have his books, his articles, and the two collections of letters that were published during his lifetime. That is enough, right?

The problem is that for a writer to be taken seriously, to be treated as a serious literary figure deserving not just of adulation but criticism, we need to look beyond the myth and find certain truths. We need to dig out that which is hidden from the public view. This is not necessarily to criticise in the sense of tearing his work apart but to analyse and contextualise. We want to understand his work on a deeper level.

Alas, since Thompson’s 2005 death, there has been little done for his legacy in any academic sense. We are now seeing the publication of some books that finally probe beyond the surface but the writers of these works have been shackled by an unwillingness among those who hold the rights to his various papers to share them with the world. (I do not want to say too much on why that might be the case, but I made some criticisms on the 20^th anniversary of his death in this article that finally explained the origin of the word “gonzo.”)

Without any support from the Thompson estate or anyone associated with it, we have had to rely upon independent scholars and collectors to gather what they can and make it available to others. Websites like TotallyGonzo and HSTbooks have shared some rare articles and the man behind the Jacka_lope Instagram page has made many previously unseen documents public.

Thankfully, there is now an archive open to scholars and it can be found at Indiana University’s Lilly Library. The documents here have been provided by Joe Yasinski and Deborah E. Fuller, who was Thompson’s assistant from 1985 to 2004. The files were gifted to the library between 2022 and 2025 and have recently been processed so that there is now a handy finding aid. (I prefer this single-page view to the expandable one.)

Some of the details and descriptions are a bit confusing. For example, you can look at a folder supposedly containing documents from 2000-2003 and find ones from 1975, but there’s not a massive amount to search through, so it’s easy enough to see what there is.

Broadly speaking, the archive consists of correspondence (a small amount of it early, most of it from later in his life), personal papers (including legal documents, memos, etc), and certain of his writings and writings about him by others. Of most interest, at least in my opinion, is a series of typescripts from the early 1960s:

I can hardly stress how important this is and how grateful I am to Yasinski and Fuller for making these documents available. I spent years researching my book on Thompson and it was extremely time-consuming trying to dig up the necessary information. There were things I wanted to know but could not find out and I see the same issues in other books about him. With this archive, it will be easier to find important information and I hope that it continues to grow.

What we really need now are manuscripts and other documents from his most creative years—the late sixties and early seventies. There is much in this archive from the nineties but I do hope that one day we will be able to scrutinise the various texts of his proto-Gonzo and peak-Gonzo works.

It has been heartening to see books like Understanding Hunter S. Thompson and some serious discussion of his works at events like Gonzofest, and with this new archive I suspect more in-depth works will come in the next years. Hell, I might even have to put out a second edition of High White Notes one day…

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Edit: A few hours after posting this, I was informed that more material has been donated to the archive, including some extremely valuable items that I am excited to see. These items have not yet been processed and do not appear in the finding aid, but they should be available next year.

For those who don’t know, Gonzofest is an annual festival celebrating the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. It used to take place in his hometown of Louisville but then switched to New Orleans last year and next year will happen in New York. The event was started by poet Ron Whitehead and typically features presentations by Thompson experts as well as live performances by poets.

I was lucky enough to attend in 2019 but that was before I wrote my book about Thompson and I was merely an audience member. It was an honour to meet some incredible people there, though, and I always swore I would go back.

I was recently asked to participate in Gonzofest 2026, specifically as part of a panel discussion on Thompson and the Beat Generation. There is much to talk about on that note, including Thompson’s friendship with Allen Ginsberg, his meeting with William Burroughs, and his on-and-off admiration of Jack Kerouac.

The website for Gonzofest shows an absolutely incredible line-up. There is Thompson’s Gonzo co-conspirator, Ralph Steadman, for a start, as well as musician David Amram and a long list of people who’ve written excellent books about Thompson: Peter Richardson, Timothy Denevi, William McKeen, Jay Cowan, Margaret Harrell, and more. (Here’s the full list.) I look forward to meeting old friends and making new ones.

There is—once again—some excellent artwork by Grant Goodwine to promote the festival:

So come along if you are able to. It’s a wonderful tribute to Thompson’s memory and a great way to continue the legacy of Gonzo journalism.

More information can be found here. There’s a Facebook page here as well. Here’s some info on previous events.

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Unfortunately, the title is something of a misnomer. Despite its title, cover, and Amazon description, the book is not about Hunter S. Thompson in Laos. It is a memoir that is also an essay collection, and one of those essays happens to be about Thompson. While it’s a pretty good book, I must say that it’s hard to get over that kind of disappointment.

The book begins with a quote from Jack Kerouac, a figure who will reappear a few times, mostly in quote form, and it is not too long before we reach the short section of this book that actually relates to Hunter Thompson. (It early placement contributed to my frustration because for the rest of the book I was wondering when Hamric was going to return to the titular topic.)

The Thompson episode relates to the author’s trip to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, in the 1990s. He went to the Lane Xang Hotel, which is where Thompson stayed during his brief visit twenty years earlier. Thompson wrote the article “Checking into the Lane Xang,” which Hamric tells us was collected in Generation of Swine. (It was not. It was published in Songs of the Doomed.) Alas, Thompson did not tell us much about Laos and his time there. He merely talked about arriving at the hotel. Thankfully, Hamric’s book fills in some of the gaps. It is very rare to learn anything new about Thompson and so this was a welcome addition.

Hamric stayed not only in Thompson’s hotel but the very same suite and he includes a few photos. He has included accounts from a few people who actually knew Thompson at that time, including Tony Stevens and David Andelman. It seems Thompson was in Laos in order to cover the fall of that city but he just got really stoned for two weeks instead. The city fell to Pathet Lao about a fortnight after he left.

That’s about it for Hunter Thompson-related material in a book with Thompson’s name in the title. If you want, you can just read it on the author’s website instead, where you can also find the photos of Thompson in Laos and his hotel suite as of the 1990s. (Part One / Part Two) The essay is expanded slightly in the book but the core details can be found in these blog posts.

The rest of the book is sort of an unconventional autobiography of an admittedly quite interesting life. Like your humble reviewer, Hamric has lived much of his life in Southeast Asia and that provides a bit of connection to the Thompson episode but mostly the book is a jumpy collection of essays that range from Buddhism to literature. The bulk of it is autobiography—Hamric’s childhood, parents, time in the army, and his love life. There is a short interview with Gary Snyder and the chapter about Thomas Merton is a highlight.

Some parts of this book are extremely well-written but it suffers from a serious lack of editing. It is thus riddled with mistakes of all kinds. We have “Laotion” instead of “Laotian” and “t0ok” instead of “took.” Alan (sic) Ginsberg makes a brief appearance. There are many other typos and also grammatical problems, such as “Our job was to intercepted…” Many random spaces appear in the middle of sentences and elsewhere words are typed over other words so they cannot be read. The text sometimes runs behind pictures, making parts unreadable. William McKeen wrote that Thompson’s anthology The Great Shark Hunt was “edited with a shovel” and that applies to this book, too. Some parts fit together but most seem pretty randomly placed. Early in the book there seems to be an attempt to connect the various parts but in the latter half we have arbitrary collections of travel quotes, dream records, and essays with little connection to what follows them. It gets messy in places and feels cobbled together.

I wish this book had been better edited and that it was advertised more clearly as the personal memoirs of someone who’s lived an interesting life. Honestly, the passages about his parents and his marriage are enjoyable and he has much wisdom related to Buddhism and Asian culture. I think people who buy this hoping for a book about Hunter Thompson will be very disappointed whereas if they’d been told “It’s an autobiographical essay collection,” then they might really enjoy it.

As someone who’s lived in Southeast Asia for most of his life and who enjoys learning about what it was like before I arrived, there was some value. Mostly, though, the short passage on Hunter Thompson was the highlight. I just wish there had been more to it. Up until the end of the essay, I really thought Hamric was intending something like Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma. That’s one of my favourite books and it seemed like Hamric was doing something similar, but then he went in a very different direction.

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They put out a press release about 20 hours ago stating that Thompson’s widow, Anita, had requested this investigation. It reads:

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is currently conducting a case review into the death of renowned journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, at the suggestion of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office following a request from his widow, Anita Thompson. The review is being conducted to provide an independent perspective on the 2005 investigation.

Hunter S. Thompson, 67, died on February 20, 2005, at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, from an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The original investigation concluded the death was a suicide.

Sheriff Michael Buglione stated that while there is no new evidence suggesting foul play, the Sheriff’s Office is committed to answering any lingering questions surrounding the case. “We understand the profound impact Hunter S. Thompson had on this community and beyond,” said Sheriff Buglione. “By bringing in an outside agency for a fresh look, we hope to provide a definitive and transparent review that may offer peace of mind to his family and the public.”

The review process is expected to take an unspecified amount of time, and there is no firm deadline for its completion. Further updates will be provided once the review is finished

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This is strange because until now there had been almost no question that he had killed himself. In fact, even the press release states, “there is no new evidence suggesting foul play.”

Why has this investigation been requested? Anita Thompson has not yet made a public statement, nor has she responded to questions from journalists. She has also spoken in the past about Thompson’s death and expressed no concerns that it was anything but suicide. And why would she? He’d always been quite upfront about the fact that he would one day kill himself.

I have no idea why this is happening now. If there were any doubts, these surely would have been raised long ago.

It brings to mind a dumb conspiracy theory that went around in the years following his death. A paywalled article seemed to claim that he had been “suicided” by the Bush administration because he knew something about 9/11 as an inside job… Of course, the article was satirical but the free part of it did not make that clear and few bothered to pay for the rest of the article, so for years Thompson’s more paranoid fans believed that he had been assassinated. I wonder if this investigation will bring that stupid conversation back…

(People will believe any old nonsense about HST. They even believe the story about his “daily routine” that was also originally written as satire!)

It will be interesting to see if Anita or anyone else close to Hunter comments publicly on the matter. I’ll keep you updated if I find out more…

P.S. Here is an essay I wrote on the 20th anniversary of his death. It finally revealed the origin of the word “gonzo.”

Beatdom

Uncovering the Origins of “Gonzo” on the 20th Anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Death

Hunter S. Thompson died 20 years ago today. For months, I have thought about what to write for this occasion as it seemed necessary to mark it in some way, but everything I thought of writing seemed so bleak. This is an anniversary of a suicide, so perhaps “bleak” is the right tone but I believe in marking these occasions with a little more positivity. …

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a year ago · 15 likes · 10 comments · David S. Wills

Part of Thompson’s genius was that he wove together fact and fiction in a way that challenged his readers. He was asking them to use their brains and not just believe everything they were told. Alas, many of his readers just accepted that he wouldn’t lie to them… Couple that with his desire to possess an outlaw allure and be the Hemingway of his generation, and you can see how we ended up in this state. Thompson kept telling crazier and crazier stories about his own life, and we kept on believing them. Hell, even his biographers repeated some of these outrageous tales!

In my 2021 book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism, I debunked a lot of them. Some of them were pretty easy and required only a minimal degree of common sense coupled with a little bit of research. Others were much harder. Today, as a quick response to the article I previously mentioned, I want to point out a few of them here.

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Myth 1: Thompson was busted by the FBI at age 9

In the article I linked to above, the author wrote:

One day in the summer of 1946, two federal agents knocked on the door of the Thompson home in the Louisville suburbs much to the surprise of the adult residents.

He is repeating a story Thompson wrote in Kingdom of Fear and which even the best of his biographers has taken as fact, but think about this for more than two seconds… Why the hell would the FBI hassle a 9-year-old boy over a prank involving a mailbox? It is absurd.

Thompson of course loved to create stories about his life in order to make himself seem like an outlaw and that included the idea of challenging the authorities even as a young child. Like so many of his other tales, this one was largely fiction. It is not written in a believable way because Thompson did not expect people to be gullible enough to take it for the truth. It was just a funny, silly story that proved a point. It is, in essence, a parable.

So what really happened?

Well, for one thing the FBI sure as hell did not come and threaten to arrest him. At that point, it was the US Postal Inspection Service that was responsible for crimes like the one the young Hunter supposedly committed (damaging a mailbox), so quite possibly he and his parents got a visit from the “special agents” at USPIS. And yes, they were called “special agents” at that time. It is likely Thompson took these facts and exaggerated them comically, as he so often did. It is also quite possible that his dad had merely warned him and that no agents ever visited his house.

Myth 2: Getting fired from the Jersey Shore Herald

Ted Gioia does not go into detail but he does briefly repeat another story Thompson liked to tell later in life, this time about getting fired from a newspaper early in his career as a writer. This one was actually very easy to debunk and I did it quite thoroughly in High White Notes.

Shortly after taking a job at a small-town newspaper, Thompson was fired. That much is true. However, he wrote a very funny and quite romantic story with himself as the tragic hero (a familiar role for him), which he later published in Songs of the Doomed. Again, this was taken rather naïvely to be the truth by his various biographers, who could quite easily have checked other sources.

For example, when Thompson’s first book was published, one of his old editors saw his name and remembered his short stint at the paper, and wrote about how he was really fired. Thompson’s tale had included the destruction of a car and a doomed love affair with a beautiful girl, but in fact he had merely fallen out with the editor over what to include in his sports section. Thompson loathed bowling and his boss wanted him to cover it.

Here’s a news article from May 1967:

He chose to provide for the world a story of his own life that was outrageous and presented himself as a comical loser, so it is relevant to the development of his literary persona, but I believe the real story is actually just as telling because it shows a young man with extremely high standards and unwilling to bend to what he saw as trivial concerns in journalism.

Myth 3: Typing the whole of The Great Gatsby

One of the most annoying Thompson myths is that he typed out the whole of The Great Gatsby. Unlike the first two items on this list, I don’t believe Thompson was ever really to blame for this one. Perhaps he was a little vague—possibly deliberately so—on occasions, but he never explicitly said that he typed out the whole of this book. Nonetheless, when people write about Thompson, they love to say that he typed out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel in its entirety (occasionally several times over!) in order to get the rhythm of it.

The fact is that Thompson said several times in interviews that he typed out a few pages of The Great Gatsby. Yes, a few pages. It is a short novel, but there is a big difference between typing two or three pages and typing two hundred pages.

Of course, the idea of a dedicated young writer meticulously researching his favourite book by typing it out in order to feel the rhythm of the prose is that sort of mystical crap that lazy journalists like to say. Why bother tracking down the origins of these claims? Why both getting a copy of his collected interviews and actually hunting down his own words when you could just repeat a lie and no one will question it…?

(Note: I think it’s highly likely that he typed out the final pages. I’ve compared these last paragraphs to his famous “wave passage” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the similarities are striking. I have an essay here and a section on it in High White Notes. I’ve also written about it in an essay for Critical Interpretations on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

Myth 4: His alleged “daily routine”

I’ve mentioned the three glaring errors I saw in Ted Gioia’s article on Thompson and those are all pretty common ones, but here is perhaps the most commonly repeated—and most obviously false and easily disproved—Thompson myth.

You’ve probably heard of “Hunter Thompson’s daily routine.” It goes around social media every few months and invariably gets thousands of likes and shares. Joe Rogan even read it on his podcast a while ago. It’s repeated so often that—like the story of him typing whole novels—it is taken for granted.

However, it is of course entirely false and there can be absolutely no doubt about that. It was never meant to be taken seriously. E. Jean Carroll included it in her biography of him under one of the fictionalised chapters. That book alternated between oral biography and pure fantasy and those fantasy chapters were so deliberately absurd that only an idiot would take them for the truth. Thompson’s daily routine appeared in the first such chapter, which also depicted her (the fictional narrator) locked in Thompson’s cesspool/dungeon. Yeah…

The daily routine for some reason was shared by the Associated Press in the 1990s and that has lent it some degree of credibility. Lots of high-profile media outlets have shared it when they needed some easy likes.

This particular myth is very thoroughly debunked here.

Others

Thompson exaggerated for a living and frequently told stories or obscured the truth in order to entertain himself and others or to teach people lessons. His drug use and criminal activity, for example, are comically over the top in many of his books. Many of his fans have failed to see this for some reason, perhaps wanting to believe in the legend rather than the man. Then there is his weird obsession with hiding the origins of certain words and names he liked. He often took things from other books and made them his own. These included words like “doomed,” “swine,” and “atavistic”; phrases such as “fear and loathing”; structures related to the use of adjectives; and names including Raoul Duke.

I could go on but you get the point. There are many stories about Thompson that are completely false, most of which he started himself and did not really expect anyone to believe. He wanted his readers to stop believing idiotic nonsense and learn how to pick apart the real and the imagined, but this backfired when he turned himself into a hero-figure. “If you start to believe in mythology,” he once wrote, “then you’re in trouble.” Indeed.

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Take “atavistic,” for example. It is certainly not a common word and yet Thompson used it frequently in his writing, so one might wonder when and where he acquired it. He is on record as saying he heard it in a bar in Ketchum, Idaho, when doing a story on the death of Ernest Hemingway. That might be true but Thompson was rarely honest about such matters. In fact, he first used it in that story but he did so after a paragraph that mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. The word “atavistic” (or atavism) appears several times in that novel, which strongly suggests that it’s where Thompson encountered it.

The origins of “savage” are less obvious but Thompson first began using it in his writing when he was going through an obsession with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Around this time, he began making references to “Kubla Khan” and in that poem we find the phrase “A savage place!” Unlike “atavistic,” “savage” is hardly an uncommon word and Thompson may not have taken it from that poem, but given that it seems to have entered his vocabulary at the time he was calling himself “Cuubley Cohn” and living in a shack called “Xanadu,” one must wonder.

When you read Thompson’s work—and I mean every damn thing you can find, including letters—and then read the writers he was interested in at that time, you often see where he found his favourite words and phrases. The above examples stood out to me and you’ll find more of them in High White Notes, but there were some more challenging phrases that have proved harder to source. Let’s take a look at three particularly well-known ones.

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Fear and Loathing

Thompson is on record as first using the phrase “fear and loathing” on November 22, 1963, in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He wrote William Kennedy that “there is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything – much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.”

Was this a phrase he spontaneously created? He had been using “the Fear” (often capitalised) for a while but “fear and loathing” feels more like something he read and liked enough to borrow. The fact that he went on to use it so much suggests that he had made note of it in earlier reading. Douglas Brinkley gave an explanation in the book Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson:

Hunter used to claim that the phrase “Fear and Loathing” was a derivation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. In actuality he lifted it from Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. He had read the novel when he lived in New York. He used to mark up pages of favorite books, underlining phrases that impressed him. On page sixty-two of The Web and the Rock he found “fear and loathing” and made it his. I asked him why he didn’t give Wolfe credit. Essentially he said it was too much of a hassle, that people would think he meant Tom Wolfe, his New Journalism contemporary.

Is this true? It is not an unreasonable suggestion but in the recent publication Understanding Hunter S. Thompson, Kevin J. Hayes notes that “This conjoined word pair has a biblical feel” but notes that it does not appear in the Bible. He tracks its use over time, starting in 1646, but then makes a very interesting observation. After saying “Thompson could have encountered this idiomatic phrase practically anywhere,” he mentions that it appears in Lord of the Flies, a book Thompson had certainly read. (He reviewed another William Golding book a few months later and quite possibly was reading Lord of the Flies for the purpose of comparing these books in late 1963.) This is not definitive proof but I find it more likely than Brinkley’s explanation.

I reviewed Hayes’ book here:

Gonzo

The story about how Hunter S. Thompson came to be called a Gonzo journalist is well known. It dates back to the writing of “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Thompson’s friend, the editor Bill Cardoso, read the article and called it “pure gonzo.” Thompson immediately adopted the word and began referring to his style of writing as “Gonzo.”

There is little debate over that, but where did Cardoso find this word? For the 20^th anniversary of Thompson’s death, earlier this year, I decided to find out. There had been many theories, including a rather preposterous one from Brinkley, who said:

The Internet is full of bogus falsehoods propagated by uninformed English professors and pot-smoking fans about the etymological origins of “gonzo.” Here’s how it happened: The legendary New Orleans R&B piano player James Booker recorded an instrumental song called “Gonzo” in 1960. The term “gonzo” was Cajun slang that had floated around the French Quarter jazz scene for decades and meant, roughly, “to play unhinged.” The actual studio recording of “Gonzo” took place in Houston, and when Hunter first heard the song he went bonkers—especially for this wild flute part. From 1960 to 1969—until Herbie Mann recorded another flute triumph, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Booker’s “Gonzo” was Hunter’s favorite song. […] Later, when Hunter sent Cardoso his Kentucky Derby piece, he got a note back saying something like, “Hunter, that was pure Gonzo journalism!” Cardoso claimed that the term was also used in Boston bars to mean “the last man standing,” but Hunter told me that he never really believed Cardoso on this. Just another example of “Cardoso bullshit,” he said.

It is tempting to believe this, particularly after one of Thompson’s friends e-mailed me to confirm that Thompson had heard the song probably in 1960, but at the same time it is strange that Thompson never actually mentioned it in writing. He wrote often about songs and musicians he admired but there is nothing in any of his letters or articles about this one.

Fortunately, I managed to find a much more likely explanation. Bill Cardoso edited an article about Baba Dam Dass the same week that he wrote to Thompson calling his writing style “gonzo.” The article contained the phrase “went Gonzo on STP.” (STP was a hallucinogenic substance.) This is almost certainly where Cardoso first encountered it. If it was not his first encounter with the term “Gonzo,” then certainly it prompted him to write to Thompson. Given that the use of that word in this article meant “going wild on an intoxicant,” it seems a little too much to believe it was a coincidence.

You can read my full report on this, with much more evidence and discussion, here:

Beatdom

Uncovering the Origins of “Gonzo” on the 20th Anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Death

Hunter S. Thompson died 20 years ago today. For months, I have thought about what to write for this occasion as it seemed necessary to mark it in some way, but everything I thought of writing seemed so bleak. This is an anniversary of a suicide, so perhaps “bleak” is the right tone but I believe in marking these occasions with a little more positivity. …

Read more

a year ago · 12 likes · 10 comments · David S. Wills

Raoul Duke

Let’s turn now to Thompson’s favourite pseudonym. Raoul Duke was his alter ego and a literary device he used often, starting in the late 1960s. As with the previous two words, there is some debate over where he found the name or when he invented it. Thompson has given several explanations and others have attempted the same. Douglas Brinkley once again had an explanation but his is objectively wrong. He claims Thompson invented the name after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago but actually it had appeared in his writing since 1965. Biographer William McKeen said he’d been using it since his days at the Command Courier but this is also untrue. Thompson claimed he’d made it up as a tribute to Fidel Castro’s brother but he was joking and very frequently gave false explanations in order to confuse people and amuse himself.

The truth is most likely that he found the name in a newspaper article. Specifically, he seems to have read one of several articles about a Calgary businessman named Raoul “Duke” Duquette. These appeared during the time he was researching Hell’s Angels, at which point Thompson was reading newspapers from all across North America as part of his research.

Of course, Thompson would never admit that he’d found the name and borrowed it. He liked to create more exciting stories and hide the truth. However, the improbable name certainly appeared in print several times in places that Thompson was very likely to have seen it and it did so during a period when we know for sure he was looking at those sources. It seems to me fairly obvious that this is the origin of Raoul Duke.

You can read more about where Thompson found his favourite words and names in High White Notes. The book also pulls apart various myths and presents the true stories behind the often-fictionalised life of Hunter S. Thompson. I also show how he borrowed literary templates from his favourite writers, such as George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised by this book. The author, Kevin J. Hayes, really does understand Hunter S. Thompson and his work, and has done an excellent job in terms of researching, interpreting, and writing. I spent years researching the most comprehensive book about Thompson and so I went into this book with the expectation of learning nothing new, yet Hayes has made some interesting discoveries and pointed out some connections that I had not noticed before. He also has taken what I think is a very useful approach, structuring the book into the following sections, each of which focuses on a different aspect of Thompson’s writing career:

1. Foreign correspondent

2. Literary critic

3. New journalist

4. Gonzo journalist

5. Campaign trailblazer

6. Anthologist

7. Letter writer

8. Novelist

It is certainly true that the book covers some old ground, but how could it not? Hayes runs through Thompson’s biography and analyses his body of work. In places, I could see where he leaned heavily on William McKeen’s biography, my own High White Notes, and the oral biography, Gonzo. However, whilst he sometimes—perhaps unavoidably—repeats facts, ideas, and observations, Hayes frequently takes the work of others and then builds upon it, which is precisely what we need in Gonzo Studies. This is a discipline still very much in its infancy, and we need texts like this that push just a little further, expanding our understanding of the subject.

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Part of the problem with studying Hunter Thompson and his work is that there is very little to go on. We have a handful of biographies and many letters, but these are not hugely reliable and they have been heavily cited already. The estate has no interest in helping scholars research Thompson’s life and work, so they do not permit access to his archives. Thus, Understanding Hunter S. Thompson begins in a very predictable way, with quotes about the young Hunter as a literate rebel, analysing the two now-famous essays he wrote as a teenager. At this stage in the book, I maintained my initial scepticism. However, here I liked the following observation, which many have suggested but Hayes makes explicit:

[The death of Thompson’s father] stunted Hunter’s emotional growth. In terms of his irresponsibility, carelessness with money, lack of impulse control, desire for instant gratification, fondness for practical jokes, and belligerence toward authority, Hunter would forever be a fourteen-year-old boy.

I wondered how Haye was going to handle certain Gonzo myths. Thankfully, he managed to avoid repeating these and takes others to task for doing so. He has not merely taken Thompson at his word and has instead attempted to pick apart the mythology.

The main strength of this book is Hayes’ ability to properly contextualise Thompson’s work. Although a lot of the book is comprised of ideas and facts borrowed from McKeen’s book and my book, Hayes does far more to situate Thompson in a literary tradition and makes many connections that I had not made and I have not read or heard others make. Some of these are wildly speculative but even so I found them insightful and quite often fun. Yes, he mentions the influence of J.P. Donleavy and Ernest Hemingway, etc. However, it is more fascinating to learn about rather less famous literary influences—or possible influences—such as Herman Melville and Vance Bourjaily. Hayes often points to something Thompson wrote and then digs up an obscure text, suggesting Thompson had read it and borrowed from it.

Unsurprisingly, my favourite parts of this book are where Hayes has veered away from the usual areas of discussion and expanded upon lesser-known parts of Thompson’s writing career. There is a section on his work as a book reviewer (or as Hayes says, literary critic), which is something few people have ever given much consideration. Indeed, it was a very short part of Thompson’s life and not an obviously important one. However, here Hayes expands upon this seemingly trivial part of his career to posit the idea of “Hunter S. Thompson’s Two-Book Theory of Literary Greatness.” Paraphrasing Thompson, he suggests that “[t]o achieve literary greatness an author must write two books as distinct as possible.” This, Hayes shows, explains why Thompson struggled so much to follow Hell’s Angels. In addition to the reasons already suggested in other books, it is possible that he simply did not want to write something that was similar to his first book so that he could view himself as among the greats. I also appreciated this observation:

Thompson’s stint as a book reviewer coincided with a crucial period in his life, after establishing himself as a serious journalist but before deciding whether to resume his novel. Reading and reviewing other authors helped him reconcile fact and fiction to develop his concept of impressionistic journalism.

Thompson’s career as a literary critic came when he was still writing for the National Observer but after his time as their Latin American correspondent. This is naturally covered in the book and Hayes quite rightly shows us that these writings were not juvenilia only of interest because they show the development of a great writer, but in fact they are worthy of consideration in and of themselves:

Gonzo journalism may be the biggest impediment to critical studies of Thompson’s early work. Since he created his unique and defining style in the early seventies, his previous writings have been measured by the gonzo standard. His South American dispatches, the thinking goes, are important only insofar as they anticipate his gonzo style. To read his foreign correspondence from the perspective of Thompson’s later style is to do his early journalism a disservice.

It is nearly impossible to write about Hunter S. Thompson and not discuss The Great Gatsby, which was his favourite book. What Hayes has done well here is to argue that an obsession with Gatsby actually handicapped Thompson to some extent. Whilst other writers of his era were radically innovative, Thompson—at least in terms of fiction—was so convinced of the perfection of Fitzgerald’s novel that he could not move beyond it as a literary model. It was something I had not thought of before but I would have to say I agree with Hayes. There are many other reasons Thompson failed as a writer and he certainly was innovative until a point, but the Gatsby template perhaps did him more harm than good, at least when it came to fiction.

On the sad subject of failure, Hayes does not shy away from criticism of Thompson, and how could any intelligent person not? The man’s output after 1972 was atrocious. Hayes handles this very well. He is brutal but fair:

The Great Shark Hunt reprints several excellent pieces, but the next three volumes of Gonzo Papers contain many items that are scarcely worth rereading or remembering, items that should be consigned to oblivion.

He does not waste much time talking about godawful texts like Curse of Lono and Better Than Sex but makes some useful observations about how bad they were. He points out, for example, that Thompson’s literary references had not changed in decades. He still referred to Poe’s Raven and compared people to Willy Loman.

Hayes is perceptive in highlighting the weaknesses even in strong books like Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America. “What’s wrong with the letter collections,” you ask? Well, as Hayes points out, Proud Highway is a great book but unfortunately it was edited by Douglas Brinkley. Hayes notes quite a few instances of Brinkley’s shoddy scholarship here. Here is one just error:

Brinkley’s willingness to accept Thompson’s word as fact and his lack of original research sometimes gets him in trouble. His most egregious error occurs in the headnote to an October 19, 1966 letter supposedly written to Charles Kuralt: “Kuralt had mailed Thompson a new essay book: The Best of the National Observer, which included more articles by Thompson than by any other journalist.”13 This one-sentence headnote contains at least two errors. The book was not titled The Best of the National Observer, nor was Charles Kuralt the one who mailed Thompson the book. The real title is The Observer’ s World: People, Places, and Events from the Pages of The National Observer. Thompson’s salutation— “Dear Charley”—does not refer to Charles Kuralt, Charley Farley, or even Charger Charley the Child Molester. It refers to Charles Preston, the man who edited The Observer’s World and the one who sent Thompson the book.

He also refers to unpublished letters to show what sort of things were left out, suggesting that the book served the purpose of continuing the Thompson mythology by omitting things that made him seem weak. “Brinkley’s headnotes repeat Thompson’s lies about himself [and] the letters were chosen to preserve and perpetuate Thompson’s legendary reputation,” we learn.

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As for the second book, it is more factually accurate but suffers from a lack of editing as there are too many weak and repetitive letters. Hayes also notes the editorial weaknesses of Thompson’s Gonzo Papers although interestingly he defends the most frequently criticised one—The Great Shark Hunt. He makes a very interesting case that it is not wholly random in its composition but in fact has an extremely complex methodology governing the order of contents.

Hayes has pointed out some aspects of Thompson’s writing that have not really been discussed before at any length. He notes the use of a cataloguing/listing device and provides quite a few illuminating examples. At one point he talks about clothing as a motif. He explains:

Clothing would remain an important motif in his subsequent writings, especially Hell’s Angels. Besides devoting considerable attention to what the Angels wear, he discusses his own clothing by way of contrast. When he first meets some Angels at a bar, he arrives wearing a Palm Beach sports coat, which he quickly strips off to fit in. In both “Footloose American” and Hell’s Angels, Thompson conveys his willingness to sacrifice articles of clothing—emblems of identity—to survive in a strange new world. Once he begins riding with the Angels, however, Thompson adapts a new costume, deliberating wearing a tan sheepherder’s jacket to differentiate himself from them.

Hayes has traced the history of the phrase “fear and loathing,” which many have discussed before but without real success. Perhaps the biggest shock—and something I think the author should perhaps have highlighted more—is that Thompson almost certainly found this phrase in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The words “fear and loathing” had appeared in many places but Thompson read that book not long before incorporating it into his own work and given his propensity for taking words he liked and making them personal catchphrases, it seems highly likely that’s what happened here. Sometimes the connections are a little more ridiculous though. Hayes does not explicitly state that Thompson took the phrase “savage journey” from Robert Burns but he does note that the Scottish poet used it in one of his poems.

I’ll mention here that readers may want to learn where the word “Gonzo” originates. This was first discovered just a few months ago and is explained here:

Beatdom

Uncovering the Origins of “Gonzo” on the 20th Anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Death

Hunter S. Thompson died 20 years ago today. For months, I have thought about what to write for this occasion as it seemed necessary to mark it in some way, but everything I thought of writing seemed so bleak. This is an anniversary of a suicide, so perhaps “bleak” is the right tone but I believe in marking these occasions with a little more positivity. …

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a year ago · 11 likes · 10 comments · David S. Wills

Another observation of Hayes’ that I found quite interesting was this:

Extensive readers read many books; intensive ones read the same books many times. Considering the number of literary references in his work, commentators have generally assumed Thompson was an extensive reader. Actually, his reading was more intensive than extensive. He would read a handful of favorites over and over—The Bear, The Catcher in the Rye, The Ginger Man, The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, Huckleberry Finn, The Magic Christian, The Sun Also Rises. Raised on robbery, Thompson became a literary Autolycus. He would snatch quotations from secondary sources to create the illusion of extensive reading.

Hayes also picks up on the fact that Thompson was in some ways a gifted writer but only achieved success because of equally gifted editors:

Thompson’s gonzo journalism flourished because he had the good fortune to work with a series of devoted and sensitive editors. […] Thompson did not see a good editor as one who tinkered with an author’s text to get it into publishable form. Hinckle was a good editor because he facilitated the authorial process.

This is naturally a recurrent theme as it is in most books about Thompson. Editors working with him needed to possess an array of skills in addition to the patience of a saint if they hoped to get Thompson to actually write something of value, a task that became harder with the passing of time.

Finally, it is perhaps of little surprise that I enjoyed the numerous references to Beat writers in this book, particularly to Jack Kerouac. I have written about the links between Thompson and the Beats before but Hayes points out a connection that I had never noticed:

After the November 1972 election but before the book version of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, McGraw-Hill released Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, a posthumous work that had been partly published years earlier. The completed work contains a 128-page transcription of a tape-recorded conversation between Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Kerouac changed their names to Jack Duluoz and Cody Pomeroy, but otherwise the book presents their conversation as it took place. Much as Kerouac saw taperecording as an extension of his spontaneous prose, Thompson saw tape-recording as an extension of gonzo journalism. Reading the monotonous transcription in Visions of Cody, Anatole Broyard said that Kerouac confused literature and reality. Broyard’s criticism suits Thompson’s Seal Rock Inn soliloquy.

One weakness with Understanding Hunter S. Thompson was brevity. Sometimes Hayes began to say something of interest and then stopped short. At one point, he mentions failures in previous accounts of Thompson’s life to understand Sportivo, the Caribbean magazine he worked for in Puerto Rico. He teases us that there are some fascinating facts no one has yet uncovered… and then merely moves on to a new point without saying anything. Hayes has also covered a huge amount of ground and yet this is a very short book, so everything is dealt with quite quickly. That is better than a boring, overly academic lecture that drones on and on about one or two texts, but at times I was left wanting to know more. There were many instances where I thought we were about to learn a huge amount about a certain text and then Hayes merely brushed over it. I understand this was probably due to limitations from the publisher, but still it felt like a missed opportunity.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book and was impressed by Hayes’ work. I can hardly expressed how happy I am that there are now books regularly coming out about Thompson’s work and I hope this is the kick in the arse needed to get the Thompson Estate to open up a little and allow more serious research. The fact that this book was published by a reputable university press is also extremely encouraging. I realise I’ve said this a few times before, but when I contacted these sorts of publishers with my own book back in 2020, they always said the same thing: Hunter Thompson is not a serious writer and does not deserve critical attention. Well, now we can see the tides are changing. Thompson is starting to gain a measure of critical respect.

***

You can find Understanding Hunter S. Thompson on Amazon or buy it directly from the publisher. It is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook format.

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The film is based on a book by Cheryl Della Pietra, who briefly worked as Thompson’s assistant and whilst it is—presumably for legal reasons—called “a novel,” the book appears to be autobiographical. The film also seems to make little attempt to hide the fact that Defoe’s character is in fact just Hunter Thompson by another name. (Or maybe it’s another Gonzo journalist who uses a cigarette holder, wears aviator sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts, and has an affinity for firearms and acid…)

Though you may remember the hype and the photos of Defoe in his Gonzo getup, you might well be wondering, “What the hell ever happened to that film? Why didn’t I see it?” Well, that’s because it was shown only once: at the Toronto Film Festival in 2023.

It is unclear why exactly Gonzo Girl was not released; however, the reception seems to have been a little less than enthusiastic and it seems no distributor was willing to pick it up. About six months ago, I wrote this article asking what the hell had happened. I wrote:

It sounds like—from what I see on the internet—the film did not impress anyone enough to find a distributor. In spite of a famous lead actor and a famous director (well, a famous actress who’s turned to directing) and a great concept for a film, no one felt it was financially viable. It was made, finished, premiered, and then just forgotten about.

Indeed, even if the movie is garbage, I still want to see it and especially Defoe’s version of Thompson. The public deserves the chance to pass judgment. How does Defoe’s version stack up against Bill Murray’s and Johnny Depp’s efforts? It seems criminal that we are not able to find out.

Ok, so maybe the film is utterly terrible. But hell, we fans of Thompson S. Thompson have endured some weak adaptations of his life and work before. We are easy people to please. We always manage to find some enjoyment in them. We should be able to do the same again with Gonzo Girl. God help us, we even endured the cinematic dog turd on a stick that was Fear and Loathing in Aspen.

The good news is that Gonzo Girl will be shown at the Tribeca Festival in June 2025. That will be the movie’s first US showing and I sincerely hope that it leads to a distributor finally taking it on. Even if it ends up on some crappy streaming app, it will be better than nothing. But then again, Thompson’s fans have gotten pretty good at coping with disappointment. How long have we been waiting for the third letter collection…?

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Five and a half decades later, the favourite to win the race was called “Journalism.” Is that a reference to our Gonzo progenitors? I like to think so… However, despite a heroic effort in the final stretch, Journalism could not beat the ultimate winner, a horse called Sovereignty.

Well, Hunter Thompson didn’t much care about who won the race in 1970. He was more interested in the crowd. The various news reports I saw today all failed to mention who was vomiting and what hideous slurs were being uttered, but then I suppose only one journalist could ever handle that kind of assignment.

Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up. —”The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” (1970)

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Five years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of that fateful race, I wrote an in-depth account of Thompson’s Kentucky Derby shenanigans. You can read it here. I say “in-depth” but actually there was one important piece of the story missing. No one ever knew where the word “Gonzo” came from until I wrote this long, investigative essay about it on the 20^th anniversary of Thompson’s death:

Beatdom

Uncovering the Origins of “Gonzo” on the 20th Anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Death

Hunter S. Thompson died 20 years ago today. For months, I have thought about what to write for this occasion as it seemed necessary to mark it in some way, but everything I thought of writing seemed so bleak. This is an anniversary of a suicide, so perhaps “bleak” is the right tone but I believe in marking these occasions with a little more positivity. …

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a year ago · 9 likes · 10 comments · David S. Wills

Yeah, it’s a long read but it answers a mystery that has plagued us for half a century. Writing it was my way of honouring a great writer’s legacy on the anniversary of his death.

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The resurrection of Gonzofest sees the party moved from Thompson’s hometown to New Orleans, where a wide range of very interesting people will gather to discuss all things Gonzo. The details can be found here: https://gonzofest.net/ It all takes place May 15-18, so a little over two weeks from now.

The event will see the launch of two books. Actually, one is considered a program rather than a book, but it’s a 100-plus-page collection of essays in printed form, so it counts as a book in my opinion. These are Critical Interpretations on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, edited by Kent Fielding and Ron Whitehead, and New Orleans Gonzofest, edited by Kent Fielding. I have not read them yet but I have seen lists of the contributors and the titles of their essays and it all sounds fantastic, so I can’t wait to get my hands on them.

I have an essay in each book. The first is about the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the second is a reprint of this long investigative study of the origins of the word “Gonzo.” I’m honoured to contribute alongside some ridiculously knowledgeable and talented people.

Sadly, I will not be at Gonzofest this year because New Orleans is a hell of a long way from my house in the Cambodian countryside, but I feel confident it’s going to be a brilliant event and these two books will be very welcome additions to the small but growing list of books on Hunter S. Thompson’s life and work. I really hope the event and these publications help bring about even more critical studies because—as I’ve said a million times now—Thompson is a criminally underappreciated writer.

Oh yeah, and there will also be a Gonzo Whiskey launched next month. To be honest, whilst I love whiskey, I’m not a huge fan of this sort of commercial venture, especially when Thompson fans would much rather get the third volume of letters or anything substantial… but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to give it a try. Hopefully it’s a successful launch and brings a little more attention to Thompson’s legacy.

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Let’s now look at the writers who had the greatest impact on him...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had to start this list with Fitzgerald because of course he was the biggest literary influence on Hunter S. Thompson. He was practically obsessed with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, viewing it as pretty much the perfect novel.

Thompson spoke often of Fitzgerald throughout his life, saying at a young age that he wanted to be “the new F.S Fitzgerald.” Whilst his various literary influences rose and fell in terms of importance, Fitzgerald was always there. He saw Gatsby as the ultimate achievement for a writer. It was lyrical, insightful, and succinct. Fitzgerald had a way of capturing characters that Thompson envied, and Thompson had a banner with Fitzgerald’s phrase “Action is Character” above his writing desk as a young man. He studied that novel carefully, making notes and even typing whole pages of it just to get into the rhythm. (He did not type out the whole book. That’s a myth discussed here.)

Thompson of course found his own rhythm and it was very different from Fitzgerald’s, but he managed that because he recognised that sometimes Fitzgerald’s prose was practically music. In an early letter, he said Fitzgerald “could make a typewriter sound like a piano.” Thompson kept tinkering with his own writing until he achieved the same thing but in a very different way.

One thing about The Great Gatsby that Thompson really admired was how concise it was. He loved that Fitzgerald had said so much in so few words and whilst Thompson was guilty of the opposite at times (getting paid by the word made him a little verbose), he consciously attempted to rival Fitzgerald with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he believed had a similar word count.

Thompson frequently used the phrase “high white notes,” which he borrowed from Fitzgerald’s short story, “Basil and Cleopatra,” and he even took the last page of The Great Gatsby and used the rhythms and punctuation to write his own great passage, “the wave” part of Fear and Loathing. (More on that here, in my book High White Notes, and also in a forthcoming essay collection to be released at Gonzofest 2025.)

Although he had made other influences, none came close to the hold that Fitzgerald had on Hunter Thompson.

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George Orwell

Thompson also spoke often about his admiration for George Orwell but I think most people somehow overlook the connection. Perhaps that’s because the general public is most familiar with Animal Farm and 1984, but Thompson was primarily influenced by Down and Out in Paris and London. Here’s a famous quote that shows Thompson acknowledging this influence:

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t reach. Facts are lies when they’re added up, and the only kind of journalism I can pay much attention to is something like Down and Out in Paris and London.

Most importantly, Thompson saw what Orwell wanted to achieve with his book, which blurred the lines between journalism and… well, it’s a struggle to call it a novel, but certainly it’s got certain novelistic features, such as an enthralling narrative and engaging characters. It’s also in no small part fiction because Orwell invented and rearranged scenes in order to present a more readable story.

What Orwell wanted to do with this book was send a message and to do so without being boring and preachy. He stuck himself into the middle of a story and built tension through an engaging narrative. He used characters and conversations to illustrate bigger points, which Thompson saw as far more effective than standard journalism and non-fiction.

The book that most closely shows the influence of Orwell is, of course, Hell’s Angels. Thompson pretty much just took Orwell’s concept and then updated it for his era, which meant rolling with the murderous bikers and hoping he survived to tell the tale. He put himself right into the narrative to provide an engaging story, then exaggerated things, found interesting characters to stand in for broad concepts, and invented conversations to make important points. All of this was modelled on Orwell.

H.L. Mencken

You don’t often see the name Mencken mentioned these days but for Thompson he was the greatest journalist of them all. And that’s an important word here—journalist. Thompson always wanted to be a novelist but in the end it turned out his talents lay elsewhere. He struggled to write good fiction and eventually created Gonzo as a sort of hybrid form.

In terms of journalism, Mencken was a true inspiration for Thompson and he had been since Thompson was a teenager. He loved to repeat Mencken’s adage: “the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” Indeed, Thompson took that message to heart when he moved into political coverage in 1972. He perhaps didn’t look down on George McGovern, but he certainly was critical and avoided that awful trap of treating politicians like heroes.

Thompson was always amazed by Mencken’s savage obituary for William Jennings Bryan. In 1994, when Richard Nixon died, Thompson was not going to let the moment pass or rescind any of his earlier criticisms. Instead, he told Douglas Brinkley “I have to out-Mencken Mencken,” and wrote a vicious eulogy, in which he said:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

The full obituary can be read at The Atlantic (even though it was originally published in Rolling Stone).

A close reading of their work shows Thompson borrowed much from Mencken in terms of language as well as spirit.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway could perhaps have come first on this list, but what the hell. He’s an obvious one but maybe too obvious. I think Thompson took a lot from Hemingway but the preceding three authors perhaps had more of an impact.

Thompson was obsessed with Hemingway as a young man and it’s easy to see in his early writings the influence of the older writer. Thompson wrote often of him, attempted to grow a beard to look like him, and compared the number of rejection slips he received to Hemingway. When he first made money on his writing, Thompson bought a dog and named it Pilar, which was the name of Hemingway’s second wife, a character in one of his novels, and also his boat.

Late in Thompson’s career, The Rum Diary was released. Thompson had written this as a young man but it was not accepted for publication until well after he achieved fame. Reading this book, it is abundantly clear that it was modelled on The Sun Also Rises. The connections are just too striking to ignore. Structurally, linguistically, and thematically it is just a re-write of Hemingway’s novel. Thompson copied Hemingway in certain short stories, too, and even borrowed from Hemingway in terms of his journalism, as he attempted to thrust himself into the middle of his stories. (As we’ve seen above, he borrowed this from Orwell to some degree. The macho, stoic side, however, was very much Hemingway’s contribution to proto-Gonzo.)

One important element here is that—as Thompson mentioned often in letters—Hemingway had started out as a journalist and gone on to become a great novelist. Thompson went into journalism largely as a gateway to fiction but never did make the leap.

After Hemingway killed himself, Thompson went to Ketchum, Idaho, to report on his hero’s suicide. This was 1961, when he was starting to find his own voice and move out from under the shadow of his influences. Hemingway maintained a presence in Thompson’s writing, though, and there are many references, some obvious and some subtle. In the end, they shared the same fate. Both many died by self-inflicted gunshots after a period of physical and mental decline that led to deep depression.

My book, High White Notes, goes into a great deal of detail about the connection between The Rum Diary and The Sun Also Rises.

Oh yeah, and Thompson once wrote a story called “The Scum Also Rises.” That’s online at Rolling Stone.

J.P. Donleavy

Finally, we come to J.P. Donleavy. Actually, he was one of Thompson’s earliest literary influences. I’m putting him last, though, because Thompson seemed to move on and references to Donleavy are scant after 1960.

Still, Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man blew Thompson’s mind when he first read it and it became a short-lived obsession for him. Thompson loved the idea of a violent, erratic, loathsome protagonist who was somehow hilarious. The novel followed the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a contemptible character. I feel it’s fair to say that there is a big dose of Dangerfield in Raoul Duke but most important of all is that The Ginger Man pushed Thompson into writing and helped him form that aspect of his own character that eventually became a literary subject. He liked to play a rude and rebellious role and it was this book that gave him permission.

Rory Feehan wrote about this in his thesis, “The Genesis of the Hunter Figure”:

Both Kemp and Duke are direct descendants of Dangerfield, differing only in terms of the degree to which they share the same character traits. Kemp offers the closest representation of the two, with Thompson effectively transporting Donleavy’s protagonist from the streets of Dublin to the skyscraper-lined avenues of Manhattan. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson returns to the character and amplifies his characteristics tenfold through a prism of violence, anarchy and the worst excess of the sixties counterculture.

Looking more closely, we see not only Dangerfield’s rebel attitude but some quirks of Donleavy’s prose in Thompson’s writing. Altogether, this was one of Thompson’s earliest influences and therefore one of the most important.

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Conclusion

These were the five writers with the biggest influence on Hunter S. Thompson, but there were many more. He admired and borrowed from the following to varying degrees and at different points in his life: Joseph Conrad, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jack London, Norman Mailer, Mark Twain, Grantland Rice, and Jack Kerouac.

Perhaps the most important lesson any writer can take from this is that Thompson learned from his heroes without copying them. (Or at least he copied them briefly during his youth and then moved on.) He took inspiration from those writers he admired but forged ahead in the creation of a unique literary voice. He realised this early, writing:

It has finally come home to me that I am not going to be either the Fitzgerald or the Hemingway of this generation… I am going to be the Thompson of this generation, and that makes me more nervous than anything else I can think of.

For those of you attempting your own Gonzo-style prose, it is worth heeding Thompson’s advice.

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I was immediately amused when Joe said that Bill was a bit of a legend and Bill replied that he basically had no idea who Joe was, having never listened to the show. However, he noted vaguely that he’d heard of Joe’s notoriety (seemingly hinting at a political difference). This then prompted Bill to mention that upon entering the building, he had noticed lots of Hunter S. Thompson stuff on the walls, and so he determined, “Well, okay… this guy can’t be a complete disaster.” This kicked off approximately half an hour of the two men talking about Hunter.

You can watch it here:

I love Bill Murray and thought it was hilarious that he had so little awareness of Joe Rogan’s show. “Are you filming this as… part of what you do?” he asks early in the show.

Bill remarks several times that he’s sick and lacking sleep and basically not on form, and indeed he struggles to remember things (including the name of the film he’s promoting) but he really is witty and insightful throughout. His memories of Hunter are wonderful and I loved hearing the two of them chat about the great Gonzo journalist. Joe never got to meet him but is a collector of HST artifacts.

A highlight for me was seeing the two men watch a clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and Bill is visibly moved by Johnny Depp’s wave monologue. Later he acknowledges that he had shed a tear.

Another highlight was Bill telling the story of Hunter tying him to a chair and throwing him in a pool. For some reason, I hadn’t known (or possibly just forgot) that it was the first time they’d met and Bill had no idea who Hunter was!

It’s a long show but it’s worth a listen or a watch. I know many of you will dislike Joe Rogan and I’ve personally been disappointed by some of his views… but as he says in this show and elsewhere, you shouldn’t have to agree with someone 100% to get along with them. Whatever his political views, he’s a hell of an interviewer and Bill Murray was the perfect guest.

I see also that Anita Thompson has posted about the podcast on Facebook. She, too, had not been familiar with Rogan’s show but said that Hunter would have approved. I must agree. Hunter would almost certainly not agree with Rogan’s views on Trump, Zelensky, and Musk, but he would have respected the fact that he’s an honest guy doing long-form content in a world obsessed with short-form, reductive nonsense. Anita wrote:

I will watch more Joe Rogan podcasts. There is not a doubt in my mind that Hunter would have loved Joe’s curiosity and focus, and the would have become friends. And he would have loved to mentor Joe and the world would be a better place today. But seeing Bill Murray step up to be a hilarious and aso serious elder statesman with Joe — reaching across the isle was a beautiful.

Admirable words. You can read them on the official HST Facebook page.