May I be allowed to say I was not surprised at all by the news that Hunter S. Thompson, who lives in the comic strip pages as Doonsbury’s “Uncle Duke,” killed himself?
It’s a Hemingwayesque ending for a writer who was to the mid-to-late 20th-century what Ernest Hemigway was to the early-to-mid 20th century. As a graduate student at Northwestern Medill’s School of Journalism I was asked to read some of his writings because they were said to represent the wave of the future.
Yet, ironically, journalism didn’t quite take off into the direction of the perceived New Journalism in terms of literary excellence as much as it seemingly made it more acceptable for reporters to reveal their own feelings. In a sense, Thompson’s new style was available in his books, in Rolling Stone magazine — but the bulk of the news media was more influenced by supermarket tabloids, talk radio and the TV entertainment news programs than anything else. He remained what he was in the 60s and 70s: a maverick, not someone whose style became the mode.
In his style journalism, the journalist himself becomes part of the story. We hate to say it but the epitome of that approach is now (hold your breath) Geraldo Rivera.
Here are some of the details about his death — which seems scripted by the same writer who wrote the life and death of Ernest Hemingway (and actually it was):
Aspen – Hunter Stockton Thompson, who coined the term “gonzo journalism” to describe the unique and furiously personal approach to reportage exemplified in his 1972 book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” died Sunday night of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Woody Creek home. He was 67, family members said.
Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Thompson’s, confirmed the death. Thompson’s son, Juan, discovered his body Sunday evening.
“Dr. Hunter S. Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head. … The family will provide more information about (a) memorial service … shortly. Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan and Anita Thompson, Hunter Thompson’s wife, said in a statement.
The Denver Post article also provides this perspective:
Countless fans strove to imitate Thompson’s startlingly candid first-person accounts that described legally errant escapades fueled by drugs, alcohol and nicotine, yet he maintained a savagely private personal life.
“Obviously, my drug use is exaggerated or I would be long since dead,” he told a USA Today reporter in 1990.
He famously threatened to shoot trespassers, providing endless fodder for cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s ongoing portrayal of Thompson as the hard- living Duke, named after Raoul Duke, a character in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The book was made into a 1998 movie starring Johnny Depp.
The drug culture and his role as a journalist who freely admitted taking them was part of his persona, and for some, his appeal — but times did change.
Did Thompson have an influence? Yes. But if you got in a time machine and went back to 1972 you’d see that it was being said that journalism was going to be quite different than the journalism we see today. He had an influence…but his style wasn’t universally cloned and didn’t set the tone for what was going to come (The National Enquirer and Entertainment Tonight did). Some argue (below) that blogging is an offshoot of his style.
—Jeff Jarvis:”Thompson was really the first reaction to one-size-fits-all journalism. He was the argument that the grand shared experience of media in a three-network, one-newspaper-town world was actually bad because it was boring and institutional and inhuman.”
—Michelle Malkin has some good links on the story.
—Protein Wisdom:”Thompson was a brilliant writer and one of the counterculture’s most recognizable figures. And with his death, America has lost a fascinating bit of its living history.”
—Tom Paine has an excellent long piece that MUST be read in full. A small taste:”He could be a bitter, graceless, savage drunk, and he often used words like blunt instruments, when a gentler method might have sufficed, but he always at least attempted to tell the truth even when the truth was not in him. He is gone, and we will not see his like again.
—Kevin Aylward sees blogging as an outgrowth of Thompson’s style:”. He left the world with a bang, literally, by committing suicide Sunday evening. Thompson’s legacy – gonzo journalism – in many ways was the first manifestation of the form of writing many of us practice today, though not nearly as well.”
–So does Radley Balko:”I realize I’m probably flirting with cliche here, but I think blogging in many ways is a modern day incarnation of the gonzo journalism that the likes of Thompson, Wolfe, and Capote made famous. I’ve always wondered why the Esquires, Rolling Stones and like titans of magazonia ever gave up on the genre. I think the advent and popularity of blogging suggests that the audience for gonzo never really went away.”
—Dean Esmay has some insights…into insights about Thompson and his work.
—Digby:”He saw it all then— the bizarre up-is-downism, the hallucinatory nature of the modern media, the craziness of America in its days of dominance. I was struck, however, at how deeply uncynical he really was, how strangely hopeful and secure that the American people were simply too solid to be completely taken in by these people. The state of politics today must have made him feel like he was on a bad trip that would never end”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.