Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (2025): A Review
My review of the latest book about Hunter Thompson.
A few weeks ago, Amazon alerted me to the release of a new book about Hunter S. Thompson. Part of the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Contemporary American Literature series, it is titled Understanding Hunter S. Thompson. To be brutally honest, I was a little reluctant to read it because I expected it to be the very opposite of what its title suggests. In other words, I assumed some pretentious academic had spent a few months reading Thompson’s work, scanning a few books about his life, and then superficially contextualised it in a way that lacked any really understanding.
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:
Foreign correspondent
Literary critic
New journalist
Gonzo journalist
Campaign trailblazer
Anthologist
Letter writer
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.
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, who has a long track record of bullshit. 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.
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:
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.
Excellent review. Thank you. Some helpful insights as I have been engaging with Thompson’s work more deeply lately.