"...the weird turn pro." Thus spake Hunter.
On this day in 1929, Hunter S. Thompson -the steadfast father and embarrassing uncle of "gonzo" journalism- was born. Is it a national holiday yet?
Little known facts:
By age 10, he was publishing his own two-page newspaper, which he sold for four cents.
By his early teens, he had already launched on the life of drinking, vandalism, and pyromania that would turn him into a bestselling writer.
At age 18, he was jailed for robbery. After serving 30 days of his 50-day sentence, he was released after promising to join the Air Force.
While serving on a Pensacola, Florida, Air Force base, he became sports editor of the base newspaper and later went to work for a paper in New York, where he was fired for kicking a vending machine. He wrote plain ol' journalism pieces for various magazines, and in 1967 he expanded one of his articles into his first book, Hell's Angels, which became a bestseller.
In 1970, while covering the Kentucky Derby, he went on a weeklong bender and developed severe writer's block. He handed his scrawled notes to the copy boys his editors sent after him, and the result, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, was hailed as a landmark in journalism. One of his editors dubbed the new style "gonzo," for its wild, careening style.
In 1972, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas became a bestseller, as did his 1972 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, about the Nixon-McGovern presidential election.
Sadly -and almost not-surprisingly- he died at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, on February 20, 2005 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 67 years old... but still, younger and cooler than everyone else.
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." ~Hunter S. Thompson
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