IMPORTANT
BIOGRAPHICAL AND LITERARY TREATMENTS
OF
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Acosta, Oscar Zeta
The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo Straight Arrow Books; 1972
Anson, Robert Sam
Gone Crazy and Back Again Doubleday, New York; 1981
"It had been Thompson, in fact who had brought the two cultures together. Over beers one afternoon in 1965, he introduced some of them to Ken Kesey. 'We're in the same business,' Kesey smiled. 'You break people's bones. I break people's heads.'"
"The truth was that Hunter Thompson, aside from certain eccentricities (such as occasionally employing a giant-sized medical syringe to inject a pint of gin directly into his stomach) was utterly sane."
"That was Hunter Thompson's greatest weakness: he didn't like being lied to. His curse was to be an old-fashioned moralist trapped in a world that, by its very immorality, continually threatened to destroy him."
Baldwin, Daniel R.
Thompson Hunting: A Search for Hunter Thompson, a Quest for the American Dream MA Thesis, University of Iowa; 1983
Bradbury, Malcolm
The Modern American Novel, Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York; 1983, p. 159
History Class Reads Between the White Lines A Hofstra University history course, inspired in part by Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" and titled "An American Odyssey: Art & Culture Across America; 6-week road trip reading Whitman, Hunter Thompson and others; 3/28/92
Beaver, H.
Great American Masquerade Vision, London; 1985, pp. 141-55
Brownmiller, Susan
Against Our Will Simon and Schuster, New York; 1975
"Had it not been for Thompson and his souped-up prose covered with a chrome shine of social significance, the bike-riding thugs in their swastika-studded black-leather jackets might have gunned off into yet another California sunset and oblivion."
"In his full-length book Hell's Angels, Thompson continued his odd mythologizing of the bike gang's habits, endowing their sadistic sexual antics and swaggering confessions with the imprimatur of Everyman's fantasy bust stopping just short of actual endorsement. Or does he stop short?"
"Years later, when he had quit mythologizing the Angels and had embarked on a more satisfying career of mythologizing himself through semifictional political-campaign reportage, the Prince of Gonzo told a fellow reporter, 'You know I was a real juvenile delinquent...got picked up on a phony rape charge, all that.' Out of this sort of stuff the image of the heroic male is formed."
Buhle, Paul
Popular Culture in America Univ. Minn. Press; 1987
"From Neal Cassady juggling his steel mallet to the course gibes and stark gibberish of the decade's finest political journalist, Dr. Hunter Thompson, the adulteration of LSD ran parallel to the sophistication and decay of the counterculture."
Conover, Ted
Whiteout, Lost in Aspen Random House, New York; 1991
Crouse, Timothy
Boys On the Bus Random House; 1972
"I also worked for Rolling Stone, and they sent me out to write the serious backup pieces, keep Thompson out of trouble, and carry the bail bond money."
"Standing outside the pressroom in the late afternoon, Hunter Thompson told Bob Semple how appalling it was to observe the White House Press, even for a few hours. 'They're like slugs on a snail farm,' he said, taking a nervous puff on his cigarette holder. 'Jesus, Ziegler treats them like garbagemen and they just take it.'"
Dickstein, Morris
Gates of Eden, American Culture in the Sixties Basic Books, New York; 1977
Draper, Robert
Rolling Stone Magazine The Uncensored History Doubleday; 1990
"Thompson, in turn, says that he no longer writes for Rolling Stone because 'it's no fun anymore.'" - Draper
"Gonzo," Hunter Thompson mutters, and shakes his great bald head. "Sometimes I wish I'd never heard of the goddamned word." - Draper
"I've worked with Hinckle, Hayes-I've worked with all the best editors. Hey. When Jann was working, he was the best." - HST
Gitlin, Todd
The Sixties; Years of Hope, Days of Rage Bantam, New York; 1987
Hellmann, John
Corporate Fiction, Private Fable
Hellmann, John
Fables of Fact Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana; 1981
"Taking this metafictional tactic yet further, in Campaign Trail Thompson creates a parodic melodrama out of his frantic attempts, while waging a battle with raging digression and paranoid hallucination, to force his pressured consciousness to construct a coherent report in the face of monthly deadlines."
"Dr. Thompson's America is a promise betrayed, a possibility of noble humanity which repeatedly reveals itself as only a sick beast."
Hollowell, John
Fact & Fiction, The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel Univ. North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill; 1977
Johnson, Michael L.
The New Journalism Kansas Univ. Press; 1971
"Thompson's book [Hell's Angels] is an especially significant document of the New Journalism, because it came about in large part because of his desire to correct the reportage of the established media, to get close to a way of life and write about it as it really was."- Johnson
"The Hell's Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times." - HST
Klinkowitz, Jerome
The Life of Fiction Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana; 1977
"Living the life of fiction, writers like Thompson create fantasies which record the spirit - if not the misleading 'actual' facts - of the life they've experienced."
"Thompson was the only journalist to ride with both Richard Nixon and the Hell's Angels. These two poles of his experience influence each other, especially when they fuse in the person of the real subject of all these stories, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson."
"The quick cut, the strategic use of digression, the ability to propel himself through a narrative like a stunt driver, steering with the skids so that the most improbable intentions result in the smoothest maneuvers, the attitude of having one's personal craziness pale before the ludicrousness which passes for the normal in contemporary American life - on all these counts Thompson and Vonnegut share a basic affinity."
Klinkowitz, Jerome
The New American Novel of Manners: The Fiction of Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, Thomas McGuane, Univ. Georgia Press, Athens; 1986
(discussing McGuane's Panama) "His behavior reads like journalist Hunter S. Thompson's, and in the Samuel Johnson epigraph to his own Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Thompson cites an explanation for such acts. 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.'"
Mailer, Norman
The Fight Little, Brown; 1975
McRoach, J. J.
A Dozen Dopey Yarns. Tales from the Pot Prohibition Mandraxed Wombats and the Monster in Room 450 Australian Marijuana Party, Globe Press; 1979
Meyers, Paul Thomas
The New Journalist as Culture Critic MA Thesis, Washington State University; 1983
Murder in High Places
NBC 2-hour pilot movie; 6/9/91 (to be called "Out of Season") by John Byrum and Stan Rogow; Ted Levine as Hunter-like character; 6/9/91
Perry, James M
Us and Them: How the Press Covered the 1972 Election Potter, New York; 1973
Plimpton, George
Shadow Box Putnam's; 1977
"With him he carried a large leather flight bag with a Rolling Stone identification decal and a badge which read PRESS; he referred to it sometimes as his 'purse' and often as his 'kit' - full of pills and phials and bottles, judging from the way it clinked when he moved it."
"Any time spent with Hunter Thompson seemed to generate its own carnival lunacy, especially when he was with Ralph Steadman, his cartoonist cohort who was with him in Zaire and who served to pep things up and inspire a corporate rather than an individual madness."
Reeves, Richard
Convention Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York; 1977
Scanlon, Paul
Reporting; The Rolling Stone Style Anchor Press, New York; 1977
"Much of what Hunter reports, those events which seem most telling, just would not have happened had Hunter not been there. 'I like to get right in the middle of whatever I'm writing about,' he says, 'as personally involved as possible.'"
Smith, Adam (pseud of George J. Goodman)
Power of Mind Random House, New York; 1975
(on Esalen) "To restore dance and touch and the other right-brained activities, Murphy had to retrieve the place from his grandmother and her tenants, the Pentecostal Church. (Murphy was not thinking in terms of brain hemispheres, only in terms of an institute of human potential, of nonverbal humanities.) The site had become - unbeknownst to the church - a homosexual hangout. Hunter Thompson, later of Fear and Loathing books, was hired as caretaker. 'Hunter brought a lot of guns,' said Murphy, 'and he almost got himself killed because he would sit in the caretaker's shack firing away at the homosexuals who climbed the fence, and one night the window was blasted away.' Thompson escaped. The church left. The institute was founded."
Steadman, Ralph
Scar Strangled Banger Salem House, Topsfield, Mass; 1987
Trudeau, G. B.
The Doonesbury Chronicles, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York; 1975
Wouldn't a Gremlin Have Been More Sensible? HR&W; 1974, 1975
An Especially Tricky People HR&W; 1975, 76, 77
Stalking the Perfect Tan HR&W; 1977, 1978
"Any Grooming Hints for Your Fans, Rollie?" HR&W; 1977, 1978
"But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There" HR&W; 1978, 1979
We're Not Out of the Woods Yet HR&W; 1978, 1979
The People's Doonesbury, Notes from Underfoot, 1978-1989 HR&W; 1978, 79, 80
"Speaking of inalienable rights, Amy..." HR&W; 1976
And That's My Final Offer! HR&W; 1979, 1980
Ask for May, Settle for June HR&W; 1981, 1982
That's Doctor Sinatra, You Little Bimbo HR&W; 1986
Wallechinsky, David
The Book of Lists Morrow, New York; 1977, pp. 245, 404
12 Writers Who Ran (Unsuccessfully) for Public Office
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1842 Victor Hugo, 1848
Henry George, 1886 Jack London, 1905
H.G. Wells, 1921 and 1922 Upton Sinclair, 1934
Gore Vidal, 1960 James Michener, 1962
William F. Buckley, 1965 Normal Mailer, 1969
Jimmy Breslin, 1969 Hunter S. Thompson, 1970
15 People Who Have Taken Peyote or Mescaline
Wenner, Jann
20 Years of Rolling Stone; What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been Straight Arrow Publishers, New York; 1987
"The first time I met Hunter S. Thompson, he arrived in my office, two hours late, wearing a curly, bubble-style wig and carrying a six-pack of beer in one hand and his leather satchel stuffed with notebooks, newspapers, tape recorders, booze, et cetera, in the other. He was wearing the wig during his bid to become sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado."
"Hunter began writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the basement of my home in San Francisco."
"It was one of those rare, fated, supercharged collaborations."
Whitmer, Peter O.
Aquarius Revisited, Macmillan, New York; 1987
"If I lived my life one day the way that Hunter does, I would be in the hospital. If I did it for three days, I would be dead."
"He leans back and laughs his first true, let it all out, cathartic laugh, and he opens up so wide you can see that none of his top front teeth are his own. The Hell's Angels probably have the original set."
Witcover, Jules
Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency. Viking, New York; 1977, p. 261
Wolfe, Tom
The New Journalism Harper & Row, New York; 1973
"But the all-time free-lance writer's Brass Stud Award went that year [1966] to an obscure California journalist named Hunter Thompson who 'ran' with the Hell's Angels for eighteen months - as a reporter and not a member, which might have been safer - in order to write Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.'"
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York; 1968, p. 168
""Kesey and Thompson were having a few beers and Thompson said he had to go over to a garage called the Box Shop to see a few of the Angels, and Kesey went along. A Hell's Angel named Frenchy and four or five others were over there working on their motorcycles and they took to Kesey right away."
"Kesey said later that the marijuana bust impressed them but they couldn't have cared less that he was a novelist."
"People were beginning to get in touch with Thompson to see if he couldn't arrange for them to meet the Angels - not the whole bunch, Hunter, maybe one or two at a time. Well, Kesey didn't need any one or two at a time. He and the boys took a few tokes on a joint, and the Hell's Angels were on the bus."
"Go with the flow - and what a flow - these cats, these Pranksters - at big routs like this the Angels often had a second feature going entitled Who Gets Fucked? - and it hadn't even gotten to that before some blonde from out of town, one of the guests from way out there, just one nice soft honey hormone squash, she made it clear to three Angels that she was ready to go, so they all trooped out to the backhouse and they had a happy round out there."