Found in his Woody Creek home. He was 67.
Details to follow.
Thompson was a brilliant writer and one of the counterculture’s most recognizable figures. And with his death, America has lost a fascinating bit of its living history.
****
update: From the AP:
Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counter-culture author of books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday 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. Sheriff’s officials did not return calls to The Associated Press late Sunday.
****
update 2: The Denver Post .
He was definitely a brilliant writer, and it’s not often someone singlehandedly changes his profession in some way, but the rest of his life…whew. He was definitely a moonbat politically, and as for his psychological problems, well, I’m not all that surprised by this development, but reading “Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail” in Rolling Stone is seared, seared into my memory.
Well, I guess if you call out Nixon before calling out Nixon was cool, then you get that rep. But I always read Thompson’s stuff as equal-opportunity anti-establishment (liberal and conservative) stream-of-consciousness meandering vitriol.
The libertarian pro-drug and pro-gun and pro-CITIZEN JOURNALIST in all of us is saddened by this loss.
Too bad. He’d become something of a crank and a moonbat in the last few years, but he was always entertaining.
I agree that he was most definitely to the far Left, but Where the Buffalo Roam was the first movie I ever owned. And some of his articles for ESPN were off the chain.
Turing: ‘Series’ as in Fear and Loathing
An intentional evoking of Hemingway?
Yes. Can’t top that, jon.
Rest in whatever peace you can find, Doc. Goodbye, and thanks for all the craziness.
I see two morals to this story:
1. Don’t do drugs of the nature and to the extent of HST.
2. If your brain is out of whack then you shouldn’t have access to a stack of guns.
Bad craziness…
HST wrote the way Muhammad Ali boxed – fluidy, easily,with natural wit and yes, vitriol. A champ.
You may have problems with his politics, or his obsession with guns, or his non-stop use of the strongest chemicals he could find, but when it comes right down to it – goddam, that boy could write…
Two Dogs, you’re right; ”Where The Buffalo Roam” was a great flick. Bill Murray was inspired casting.
But, while ”Fear and Loathing” was a good book, the movie version sucked ass. Only bad movie Depp ever made, IMO.
Oh, and how’s this for a bit of irony. My secret word is live.
“Well, I guess if you call out Nixon before calling out Nixon was cool, then you get that rep. But I always read Thompson’s stuff as equal-opportunity anti-establishment (liberal and conservative) stream-of-consciousness meandering vitriol.”
As far as that goes, Jon, I agree 100%, but if you’d read any of his columns over the last few years, especially the ones for ESPN, he was a raving moonbat, talking about how W was a criminal and a lunatic, and all the other insane moonbat crapola. I have been a fan of his since the first installments of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” trust me.
I will miss him … BIG HUG for Juan, Jen, Willam and Anita… who never be able to fill the hole left in there lives by the man in spite of the myth and legend attached to his life.
What a shame someone with his talent bought into the death-cult ignorance of modern liberalism. Look where it got him. I feel pity for him and especially his family, but I also feel the vast waste of that nihilistic philosophy. May God show mercy on his soul.
Fabulous writer…we wouldn’t have PJ O’Rourke for one without him. Damn, I’d happily sign out at 67 (or was it 65 as the NYT reported?) if only I could do anything in this life as well as he wrote.
Appropriately, submit word is “best”. Synchronicity eh?
I liked him a lot and I liked Fear+Loathing, but considering he killed himself instead of dying of natural causes (or accidental OD) I don’t really care as much. It’s like a bitch slap from Bush to the left whinge.
-digging through the layer of chinese food cartons- Dammit, who took all the Kung Pao? And get the peacock off the trampoline, you know what it does to him.
The world feels colder, knowing that a man like thompson has gone.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has the best opening paragraph in American literature and it just gets better from there.
Thompson will be remembered as the Kerouac of his generation.
Sadly, he was on the downhill slide and he knew it. This is depressing news, but almost predictable. Self-destructive genius to the last.
It would be a stretch to call the good doctor a literary anything, much less genius. He had a style that, for a while, meshed with his times but that started wearing more than a tad thin after those times passed. He became like so many who capture a piece of the zietgeist and try to hold on to that moment in time more self parody than anything else.
Meanwhile, back in Barstow…
A colorful character…probably lived more in his years than ten ordinary people get out of one life.
However, I gotta ask: what is with all the avoidance of the “s-word”?
<style that, for a while, meshed with his times but that started wearing more than a tad thin after those times passed. He became like so many who capture a piece of the zietgeist and try to hold on to that moment in time more self parody than anything else. </i>
HST ignored my frequent requests that he wear a white linen suit.
“Curse of Lono” is an underappreciated gem of a Thompson work. It’s thoroughly non-political and works at any moment in time.
Hey, c’mon. Do we really know it was suicide? Hunter was known as someone speaking Truth to Power ™, how do we know he didn’t just go a little too far? Maybe to a place that makes Karl or W a little too uncomfortable.
Or perhaps Hunter was working on his latest and greatest expose? And was just putting on the finishing touches before he was killed (murdered?) by “self-inflicted wounds”? Has the press mentioned this new article? I wonder why not – perhaps they’re in on the consiracy too?
I’m old enough that I actually saw “Where the Buffalo Roam” in the theatre. An awful, awful movie, but I still remember the tagline from the newspaper ads: “He Broke the Mold Before He was Fully Formed.” Kind of sums things up nicely.
Tim Worstall mentioned that we have Hunter to thank for P.J. O’Rourke. Say what you want to about his politics, his lifestyle, and his personality–the man has a legacy.
And Turing word: “good.” Nope, no irony there. :/
Not to mention Tom Wolfe
Strangely, some guy commenting as “Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” left the same copy and paste left wing rant on 4 or 5 of my posts yesterday. I deleted them because of language, but now that I realize who he was commenting as, I am truly disgusted. To use a man’s name at a awful time of grief is beyond the pale imo.
Except P.J. O’Rourke actually wrote about stuff he did. The only thing that one could reasonably say he got from Thompson was about 10% of an attitude.
I don’t mean to upset the fans or anything, but I, at one time, thought HST was cool also. But then I turned 15 and grew out of it. After that, I never got what was so cool or deep about him. The best praise I can give him is that could turn creative phrases and sometimes string a few of those phrases into an interesting paragraph or couple pages of text (and how many bloggers can do that every day?). But beyond that, nothing he wrote had any purpose, point or direction except to trade on his pose of angry iconoclasm.
Damn. And to think that if I had spent my life swimming in alcohol and eating adrenal glands I could have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 67.
No, but seriously. I heard that a bullet to the brain can really mess you up.
I hung with Thompson a few times at the beginning of the 70s in San Francisco and was , as young men are, impressed with him at the time.
That said, you get no admiration from me (as I said over on my page) if you shoot yourself at home and leave your wife and son to find the body and clean up.
It’s the ultimate cowardly and selfish gesture.
[The magic word below is “real.” as in “Get…”]
Russell,
Like you, I outgrew him as well and, for the sake of everything I enjoyed earlier in his writing, have ignored everything post-90’s. But you’re wrong in that his only stock-in-trade was a “angry iconoclasm.” His work on the 1972 campaign was quite good–often prescient, engaging and with some quality research–good journalism, in other words. And if you’re looking for a “purpose” in his work, remember he was at Big Sur and SF when it actually was in the embryonic phase of the counter-culture, and his work reflects, not the adolescent, knee-jerk protest mindset of a lot of today’s Left, but, pre-1968, the images, ideals and hopes of what his genereation wished for. Naive? Probably. But, I think he means to project the feeling of the early days and what it was like being a part of it. Read his account of cruising the 405 on a Vincent BlackShadow and you’ll feel what he means.
What a blogger HST could have been. I wonder if he was even aware of blogs?. I was never a big fan of his but did find him an interesting character to say the least.
A little bit of the HST:
[apropos spam filter word: “using”]
Maybe it was the successful Afghan and Iraqi elections that killed the deranged old fella. In his self-hatred, he couldn’t bear to see that Americans weren’t losers. They were right all along.
And damn Bush for trying to reform Social Security. Though perhaps, if you look with the right kind of eyes, it looks fine just the way it is. There’s your Black Darkness.
Big/Black–it’s all forboding and ominous.
Man, I really picked the wrong week to stop huffing ether.
(Turing word: “doing.” Which, seeing it outside a sentence, I can’t help but mentally pronounce in the way Beavis announces a boner. “Doioioioioinnngggggg!” Reminds me of the Gannon thread, it does.)
“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didnt vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American Character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Kingdom of Fear” 2003
And fuck the high-horse the cut-and-paste artists rode in on.
People miss the fact that Hunter S. Thomson was not Raoul Duke
Hunter was a humorist and his character was his clown. The real Hunter S. Thomson sat in a hotel room in Las Vegas, stone cold sober and wrote “Fear and Loathing.”
Hunter generally couldn’t write stoned anymore than anyone else could… He admitted this on occasion.
Anyway he was one of my favorite writers and I’ll miss him.
I notice that my favorite paranoid writers (Hunter Thomson and Philip K. Dick) were both drug users. Hunter made paranoia into comedy though and I’m not sure Dick ever made me laugh.
God Damn drooling mumbling brain-damaged shuffle footed auto-syphylitic morons! I could do without the internet idiots typing “the man was a liberal, glad he’s dead, we won the election nya nya nya nya nya” I realize that your paper thin brains couldn’t withstand the pressure of the election without turning into the Manchurian zombie poster.
But please seek deprogramming counciling. You’re drooling on my shoes. And I say this as someone who voted for Bush.
For “The Oracle”
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
(I had to include the second paragraph because it has the punch line to the bats joke).
Hmmmmm…..where was Smirky McBushchimpy when Thompson supposedly committed suicide?
Brussels? That wasn’t Brussels. It was a scale model version of Brussels in the White House basement next to the scale model of the Tora Bora mountain range where they’re holding Osama.
Little Hitler would have had plenty of time to knock off Thompson and fly back to the White House in time for “breakfast in Brussels”.
Jeff, could you work harder at keeping the dogs outside? thanks.
What I wanna know is…..WAS HE TARGETED?
Whadya think Eason? You’ve got plenty of time on your hands now. Look into it!
Ummmm, Gerard……it’s called “saracasm”.
HST wasn’t just Fear and Loathing (a great work in itself).
For those who haven’t read, or who have forgotten, HST was literary, and a genius of some rank. Pick up “Hell’s Angels” or “Great Shark Hunt” or “Lono”.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
”…he was a raving moonbat, talking about how W was a criminal and a lunatic, and all the other insane moonbat crapola.”
That was all because he missed Richard Nixon.
Well, it’s been hours since I posted my little conspiracy theory and only one bite. Sheesh. You’d think JG’s computer was down or something…
McGehee, that is exactly the copy and paste the troll posted over and over, except he used his sn as Dr. Thompson. Guess that is what the lefties want us to remember.
I’m sorry if I copied an annoying moonbat troll, but I thought that his descent into hateful moonbattery should not be forgotten. Thompson didn’t believe in “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”…
and neither do I.
Is there no communication in this blog? Have we deteriorated to the level of dumb beasts?
haven’t read anything he did since the 70s, so i can’t say i’ll really miss having him around… come to think of it, the past decade or so he’s just been kinda there, literature-ally speaking, if that’s even possible, which i doubt, since i just made that word up.
heh. ^ tribute sentence.
yeah, he was probably a bit of a jerk, but what an interesting guy. 100% crazy energy.
God Loves Us All
Poor Hunter.
A small stroke left him with the decision to have a kid change his pad and we to mock or Bad Latte.
Hunter was a hero.
I will burn a candle for his kinder this next moon.
True.
I don’t qualify as an expert on HST’s writings or anybody else’s for that matter. I’ve read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at least five times, and I think I’m one of only a handfull of people that have seen and have liked the movie. I feel a strong connection with that novel because I happened to be living in Las Vegas during that time period. Even through the eyes of an nine year old boy, that town was deranged. It was a strange time, and a strange mix of cultures. I remember signs on the strip for Martin and Lewis, and Sinatra, at the same time remembering the music of the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and the like. Because of the presence of Nellis A.F.B. the vietnam war wasn’t far away either. My best friend’s father was in the Hanoi Hilton the entire time that I knew him, and my own father had just returned from a tour of duty.
I’ll read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas one more time, and then put it away again for another five years or so. Thompson captured something in that book, I’m not sure what, and for that I’ll miss him.
Interesting to note that HST would be the first to admit he was an opportunistic charlatan.
What a shame he had to check out this way,I quote him every other day.
I guess the weasels finally closed in.