Hunter S. Thompson obituary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq4bdRA2Pko&fmt=18
Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, most famous for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and firearms), and his iconoclastic contempt for authority.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands. He was the first son of Jack Robert (1893 3 July 1952), an insurance adjuster and a U.S. Army veteran who served in France during World War I, and Virginia Davidson Ray (1908 1998), a reference librarian and secretary who, while a student at the University of Michigan, had joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. Introduced by a mutual friend from Jack's fraternity in 1934, they married in 1935.[1]

Jack died of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, on 3 July 1952, when Hunter was 14 years old, leaving three sons — Hunter, Davison, and James (19491993) — to be brought up by their mother. Contemporaries indicated that after Jack's death, Virginia became a "heavy drinker."[1]

Interested in sports and athletically inclined from a young age, Thompson joined Louisvilles Castlewood Athletic Club, a sports club for teenagers that prepared them for high-school sports, where he excelled in baseball, though he never joined any sports teams in high school. He was constantly in trouble at school.
In 1965, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, offered Thompson the opportunity to write a story based on his experience with the California-based Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After The Nation published the article (17 May 1965), Thompson received several book offers and spent the next year living and riding with the Hell's Angels. The relationship broke down when the bikers suspected that Thompson would make money from his writing. The gang demanded a share of the profits and Thompson ended up with a savage beating, or 'stomping' as the Angels referred to it. Random House published the hard cover Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966. A reviewer for The New York Times praised it as an "angry, knowledgeable, fascinating and excitedly written book," that shows the Hells Angels "not so much as dropouts from society but as total misfits, or unfits — emotionally, intellectually and educationally unfit to achieve the rewards, such as they are, that the contemporary social order offers." The reviewer also praised Thompson as a "spirited, witty, observant and original writer; his prose crackles like motorcycle exhaust."[10]

Following the success of Hells Angels, Thompson was able to publish articles in a number of well-known magazines during the late 1960s, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Pageant, and others. In the Times Magazine article, published in 1967 shortly before the "Summer of Love" and entitled The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies, Thompson wrote in-depth about the hippies of San Francisco, deriding a culture that began to lack the political convictions of the New Left and the artistic core of the Beats, instead becoming overrun with newcomers lacking any purpose other than obtaining drugs.[11] It was an observation on the 60s' counterculture that Thompson would further examine in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other articles.

Thompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" known as "Owl Farm" in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Thompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson) and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot. Mistaking the shot for the sound of a book falling, they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him. Thompson was sitting at his typewriter with the word "counselor" written in the center of the page.

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[paintballpunk168]

one of god's own prototypes, never considered for mass production, to werid to live, but yet to rare to die. Always with us

[mileslake]

"The Mass Of Men Lead Lives Of Quiet Desperation" H.D.T.. Mr Thompson, was NOT one of these men.

[HunterSAnderson]

The useless banterings of a rhetorician hard at work, or valuable assets to a society that begs for wordsmithing? What, indeed, do we believe to be the true definition of the American Dream? Perhaps I have the answers, perhaps not. Either way, this topic is opened for discussion in my new video.

[CrashPadder]

you are missed.

[nonfoods1]

Never clean your gun with a pewl cue

[aleksecond]

Hunter S. Thompson - crazy bitch