Ping: Hunter S. Thompson

[Suicane75]

Is there internet in heaven?

[korme]

quit making a mockery of his death

[Suicane75]

quit making a mockery of his death

Who? Besides, i'd be interested to see how the anti-abortion crowd comes down on this one.

[TLK]

:disrespect:

[BigJohn&TheLions]

Who? Besides, i'd be interested to see how the anti-abortion crowd comes down on this one.

Quit making fun of the anti-abortion crowd.

[korme]

quit making fun of paul westerberg

[Suicane75]

Quit making fun of Sovereignstar, he always sleeps with his binky.

[TLK]

Hunter S. Thompson found dead


21/02/2005 - 07:11:35 http://newsfeed.tcm.ie/images/people/huntersthompsonAP.jpg

Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularised a new form of fictional journalism in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fatally shot himself last night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death to the News.

Juan Thompson found his father’s body. Thompson’s wife, Anita, was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 drug-hazed classic about Thompson’s visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was Dr Thompson, a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.

Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism – or, as he dubbed it, “gonzo journalism” – in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.

“Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairy-tale artist,” Thompson said in 2003. “You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you’re writing about before you alter it.”

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections as Generation of Swine and Songs of the Doomed. His first ever novel, The Rum Diary, written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era, and Richard Nixon once said he represented ”that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character”.

Thompson also was the model for Gary Trudeau’s balding Uncle Duke in the comic strip Doonesbury and was portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They are pictured together here at the premier of the film adaptation of Thompson’s book in May, 1998, in New York.

Other books include The Great Shark Hunt, Hell’s Angels and The Proud Highway. His most recent effort was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.

His compound in Woody Creek, not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons; in 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, trying to chase a bear off his property.