Although Thompson’s beloved peacocks roam his property freely, it’s the flowers blooming around the ranch house that provide an unexpected high-country tranquility. Located in the mostly posh neighborhood of western Colorado’s Woody Creek Canyon, ten miles or so down-valley from Aspen, Owl Farm is a rustic ranch with an old-fashioned Wild West charm. The second volume of letters, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976, has just been released. In 1997, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, the first volume of Thompson’s correspondence with everyone from his mother to Lyndon Johnson, was published. Thompson’s other books include The Curse of Lono (1983), a bizarre South Seas tale, and three collections of Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt (1979), Generation of Swine (1988) and Songs of the Doomed (1990). A self-confessed political junkie, Thompson chronicled the 1992 presidential campaign in Better than Sex (1994). His next book, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, was a brutally perceptive take on the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign. As the subtitle warns, the book tells of “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” in full-tilt gonzo style-Thompson’s hilarious first-person approach-and is accented by British illustrator Ralph Steadman’s appropriate drawings. In 1967, Thompson published his first nonfiction book, Hell’s Angels, a harsh and incisive firsthand investigation into the infamous motorcycle gang then making the heartland of America nervous.įear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which first appeared in Rolling Stone in November 1971, sealed Thompson’s reputation as an outlandish stylist successfully straddling the line between journalism and fiction writing. Thompson completed The Rum Diary, his only novel to date, before he turned twenty-five bought by Ballantine Books, it finally was published-to glowing reviews-in 1998. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs-all of which ended badly-before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence.” In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hunter S. Interviewed by Terry McDonell & Douglas Brinkley Issue 156, Fall 2000
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |