Hunter S. Thompson has been gone for twenty years now. When he went out, as the new Pursuit of Wonder video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a excessively American manner: with a gun, and in the mean time of his personal choosing. Even his lengthytime followers who respected somefactor in regards to the company evident in that selection naturally remorseted that he’d made it; many people have wished aloud that we might learn his judgments of the previous twenty years’ developments in U.S. politics, culture, and society, which might certainly slot in properly sufficient with the narrative of decline he’d pursued because the late sixties.
On the identical time, we recognize that Thompson’s manner of living would laboriously have allowed him to stay into his late eighties (the person himself expressed surprise to have reached his sixties), and that it was inextricable from his manner of writing. Which isn’t to name it the principle ingredient: as generations of imitators have confirmed, ingestion of controlled substances and a disrespect for traditional narrative structure don’t, by themselves, constitute a recipe for the “gonzo journalism” Thompson pioneered. Actually, he had a wholesome respect for structure, cultivated by means of his early profession in workaday reportage and a self-imposed prepareing regime that concerned re-typing the whole of A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby.
Gonzo journalism, according to the narrator of the video, actually has a serious question to ask: “Should not the particular subjective filters by which information and occasions are processed and imagined in a second in history as relevant because the information themselves in beneathstanding the reality of that second, or a minimum of a slice of the reality?” Thompson’s most broadly learn books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Worry and Loathing on the Campaign Path ’72 stand as two makes an attempt at a solution. However from the late seventies onward, as his “lifelengthy companions of medication and chaotic behavior nestled closer, the strains between his larger-than-life character in his work, his public persona, and his true self started to blur.”
It may very well be mentioned that Thompson never recovered the deceptive clarity of his Worry and Loathing-era work, although he remained professionallific to the top. Certainly, there’s a lot of value in his final three a long time of writing for learners attuned to who he actually was. “He was not merely the character he portrayed in his work and public life, however the man who cared sufficient, and was talented sufficient, to create this character with a view to discover, beneathstand, and repredespatched a really nuanced condition of the world during his time.” It will, perhaps, have been wagerter if he’d been in a position, sooner or later, to retire the medication, the firearms, the solarglasses, and the paranoia and provide you with a brand new persona. What saved him from doing so? Possibly the notion, as articulated by his nice inspiration Fitzgerald, that there aren’t any second acts in American lives.
Related content:
Read 9 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)
Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life
Read 18 Lost Stories From Hunter S. Thompson’s Forgotten Stint As a Foreign Correspondent
Hunter S. Thompson’s Harrowing, Chemical-Filled Daily Routine
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.