5 Writers Who Influenced Hunter S. Thompson

A look at the writers who inspired the great Gonzo journalist.

Hunter S. Thompson developed a style of writing that was entirely his own, yet like most great artists he did so by learning from those who came before him. He drew upon their ideas and styles but combined them, adapted them for his era, and ultimately made something totally new: Gonzo journalism.

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.

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.

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.

This article was a very brief overview. For an extremely detailed study of Thompson’s work, including a breakdown of the various ways that the abovementioned writers influenced his work, see my 2021 book, High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.