La cabaña de Hunter S. Thompson, el periodista gonzo

HUNTER S. THOMPSON'S WRITING BOOTH


Hunter S. Thompson
Por AlohaCriticón

HUNTER S. THOMPSON
(1937-2005)

Hunter S. (Stockton) Thompson nació el 18 de julio del año 1937 en Louisville, Kentucky (Estados Unidos), hijo del vendedor de seguros Jack Robert Thompson y de Virginia Davidson Ray.

En su adolescencia se aficionó a la lectura y consumió abundante alcohol.

En este período de su vida pasó algún tiempo en la cárcel por pequeños robos.

Después de servir en los años 50 en la Fuerza Aérea de los Estados Unidos, en donde ejerció la crónica deportiva, Thompson acudió a la Universidad de Columbia para seguir un curso de escritura creativa.

Ejerció el periodismo en diversos medios, entre ellos “The National Observer”, “The Nation”, “Playboy”, “Rolling Stone” o “The San Francisco Examiner”, y fue uno de los puntales del denominado “Nuevo Periodismo” junto a Tom Wolfe o Truman Capote, siendo el creador del periodismo “gonzo” al elaborar crónicas autobiográficas desde una determinante implicación subjetiva del redactor en el ambiente del objeto del reportaje.

Su primer trabajo en este estilo, bautizado por el periodista Bill Cardoso, fue el artículo “El Derby De Kentucky Es Decadente y Depravado”.

En los años 60, en plena época hippie y contracultural, además del alcohol, Hunter probó diferentes sustancias psicotrópicas, desde el LSD a cocaína, pasando por marihuana o peyote.

Entre sus influencias literarias se encuentran miembros de la Generación Beat, como Jack Kerouac o William Burroughs, además de otros escritores como Ken Kesey, William Faulkner, Henry Miller o Joseph Conrad.

En “Los Ángeles Del Infierno” (1966) escribió sus experiencias con Los Ángeles Del Infierno.

Estas experiencias terminaron con agresiones del grupo de motoristas al periodista.

En “Miedo y Asco En Las Vegas” (1971), su libro más conocido, narró cargado de drogas sus vivencias en la ciudad del juego.
En “La Gran Caza Del Tiburón” (1979) fue requerido por la revista “Playboy” para hacer un singular reportaje sobre un torneo de pesca en la península de Yucatán.

“El Diario Del Ron” (1998), libro centrado en un periodista alcohólico, fue su única novela.
En “El Escritor Gonzo” (2000) se trataba su vida y su forma de hacer periodismo.

Al margen de estos títulos editados en español, Thompson también ha editado los libros de relatos “Kingdom Of Fear”, “Screwjack” y “Hey Rube”, y, entre otros volúmenes, “Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail’ 72” (1973), crónica política que siguió la campaña presidencial de 1972 para la revista Rolling Stone, y “La Maldición De Lono” (1983), libro ambientado en Hawai.

En el año 2013, la editorial Gallo Nero publicó “El Último Dinosaurio” (2013), una recopilación de entrevistas al autor estadounidense.


Thompson fue miembro de la Asociación Nacional del Rifle.
En cuanto a su vida sentimental, Thompson se casó en el año 1963 con Sandra Dawn Conklin, con quien tuvo en 1964 a su hijo Juan Fitzgerald.
La pareja se divorció en 1980.
En el año 2005 se casó con su secretaria Anita.
Se suicidó el 20 de febrero del año 2005, fecha en que se disparó en su cabeza en su rancho de Colorado.
Tenía 67 años de edad.
Fue incinerado.

Guía de sus adaptaciones cinematográficas y televisivas en AlohaCriticón

Comentarios de Libros

Miedo y Asco En Las Vegas (1971)

"Con la verdad tan aburrida y deprimente, la única alternativa de trabajo son las explosiones salvajes de locura y filigrana"

(Hunter S. Thompson)

A decade after Hunter S. Thompson

Kyle Leitch

Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone in its infancy/Hunter S. Thompson Estate

Too weird to live, too rare to die

They say that one should never meet their heroes. “They can never live up to the ideal person that you’ve mentally made them out to be,” someone once told me. I never got the chance to meet one of my heroes. By the time I first became familiar with his work, he was already dead. In my lifetime, he was an incoherent mess. A crippled shell that had locked away the most rebellious outlaw spirit the literary world was able to abide by.

Perhaps it was better this way. Even now, I don’t think I would be equipped to meet Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. He would probably hate someone like me, anyway. A university student playing at Gonzo journalism. Even still, this being my last year at the Carillon, and a full decade after Thompson’s passing, it seems to me to be too serendipitous to pass up at least writing something of a proper eulogy.

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky on July 18, 1937. Thompson’s father died at a young age, leaving the family in poverty. At the age of 17, Hunter Thompson was incarcerated for 60 days for abetting a robbery. After serving only half of that sentence, he joined the United States Air Force. It was working for Eglin Airbase’s newspaper that Hunter Thompson got his first taste of professional journalism. After an honorable discharge in 1958, Thompson began drifting across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, working for every newspaper that would accept an article from him.

By 1965, Hunter had returned to the United States. He was contacted by then-editor of the Nation, who wanted Thompson to write a story about the California-based Hells Angels motorcycle club. Hunter spent a year living and riding with the gang for research. The resulting article spawned Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. After a spat with one of the members, the Hells Angels stomped Thompson, which only led to further publicity for the book, including a CBC Television confrontation between Hunter and Angels member Skip Workman.

The success of Hell’s Angels made it possible for Thompson to start contributing to more prolific newspapers and magazines, but it also gave him a solid relationship with publisher Random House. The royalty check from sales of Hell’s Angels gave Thompson enough money to buy Owl Farm, the fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado, where Hunter and his family spent the rest of their lives. A $6,000 advance from Random House saw Hunter covering the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Although that book would never be completed, Hunter’s contract with Random House would be fulfilled in 1972.

In 1970, Thompson ran (unsuccessfully) for the local sheriff’s office in Aspen, Colorado. It was a particularly memorable election, not only because Thompson’s “Freak Power” party posed a viable threat to the Democrat/Republican dichotomy, but because Thompson had set up camp in the offices of Rolling Stone magazine with beer and the promise that he was soon to be the new sheriff of Aspen. Although he was soundly defeated, Thompson had captured the attention of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, who sent Thompson out to do an expose on the murder of television journalist Ruben Salazar. In typical Thompson fashion, he blew off much of that assignment, and instead, took a Sports Illustrated pitch to cover the Mint 400, a race through the deserts of Nevada. SI rejected Thompson’s 2500 word take on their 250-word pitch outright. Thompson then sent the work back to Jann Wenner. This would become part one of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” I was thirteen when I read the first sentence of “The Vegas Book,” as Hunter would later call it. Like generations before me, I was about to learn a lesson that I was far too young to appreciate. Freedom of speech, the pursuit of happiness, liberty, the fundamentals of North American democracy and of the beloved American Dream—they were all dead. The book was a mainstream success, and it is perhaps, sadly, what Thompson will be best known for.

Within the next year, Thompson wrote extensively for Rolling Stone, covering the 1972 Presidential Election, which pitted incumbent Richard Nixon against Senator George McGovern. Because Nixon did very little campaigning for re-election (and because he and Hunter were bitter enemies by this point), Thompson covered the Democrats almost exclusively. As history played out, McGovern would be handed one of the most disastrous defeats in U.S. political history.

Buy the ticket, take the ride/Hunter S. Thompson Estate

After 1972, however, things began to quickly slide. Thompson’s rampant substance abuse and rebel attitude were quickly catching up with him. After sleeping right through the “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974, and several cancelled assignments later, Thompson found himself at odds with Rolling Stone, the only magazine with which he would ever find something resembling a steady platform. The 80s and 90s were marred by run-ins with the police and irregular acid-soaked gibberish. Thompson’s ruminations of the 1992 Presidential Election were assembled into Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, a noticeably worse rendition of his campaign coverage from twenty years prior.

In 1998, Thompson’s work enjoyed a minor resurgence in popularity with the release of the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starring Johnny Depp. Thompson’s “long lost” first novel The Rum Diaries was published soon after the film’s release. 2003 saw the release of Thompson’s penultimate collection, Kingdom of Fear. Many saw it as a vitriolic attack on the turn of the century in America and the attacks of Sept. 11. In mid-2004, publisher Simon & Schuster released Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness, a collection of Thompson’s weekly column for ESPN. On Feb. 20, 2005, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson died from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun.

Of course, this has all just been a very loose recounting of the life and work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. After all, the Father of Gonzo produced fourteen books and hundreds of articles. To get into everything would require more space than the Carillon could afford. He’s been the subject of documentaries, cartoons, speaking tours, and other writers’ works.

Thompson had a very unique problem in his life. During a 1978 BBC interview, Thompson admitted that he often felt pressured to live up to the persona that he’d created in Fear and Loathing. Thompson told the BBC that, “I’m never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often, they conflict — most often, as a matter of fact. … I’m leading a normal life and right along side me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I’m not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I’m not sure who to be.” Ironic that the very thing that started Thompson’s career simultaneously ended it.

But what does Thompson mean today? It’s been a decade since the death of the outlaw journalist, and some have argued that he’s a relic of the counterculture that he lamented the death of in the 1970s. That’s actually sort of the point of this feature, gentle reader. Thompson often wrote about the malignant ills of society. To him, the status quo was sickly, and he was one of the vocal minorities who could not only see through the façade that was set up by our benevolent leaders, but was going to shout it down. In many ways, the Carillon and Hunter Thompson could be seen as spiritual allies. The tyrants’ foe, the peoples’ friend, illegitimi non carborundum, refuse to accept the plate of bullshit that everyone gives you, fork in hand. Hunter Thompson was more than a reckless and drug-fuelled raver. He was one of the most keen-eyed observers of society, the most dangerous individual the literary world could tolerate, and someone I’m proud to call a hero, even now.

Of course, it’s more than me that matters. I can’t be the only one who was influenced into action by the Doctor. I encourage anyone who wants to, come seek me out, and let me know just how Hunter S. Thompson has affected how you’re living your life. It’s serendipitous that the 10th anniversary of Thompson’s death—Feb. 20, 2015– falls on a Friday, no? I’ll be haunting bars all around the city. Come say “hi,” or come share your Hunter tales with me. I won’t be hard to miss. I’ll be slugging Wild Turkey, with slices of lemon in it, so as to disguise it as iced tea. I’ll be wearing an Acapulco shirt, waving an electric cattle prod around, and I’ll be shrieking about the first time I ever read, “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”

Paul Harris/Getty Images

1994, Aspen, Colorado, USA — ‘ Hunter S. Thompson Outside His Home.’ |
 Photo by Christopher Felver.

My gonzo night at Hunter S Thompson's cabin

Kevin EG Perry. @kevinEGperry

Fear and petting … Thompson with his pet wolverine and his cherry-red Pontiac at his Colorado cabin. 

Photograph: National Geographic Image Collection/Alamy

Fuelled by hard drugs and righteous anger, his incendiary prose shook America. Could our writer channel his spirit by spending a night at the typewriter where it all happened?

It is 4.30 on a Thursday morning and I am writing these words on the big red IBM Selectric III that once belonged to Hunter S Thompson. Owl Farm, Thompson’s “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, is dark and silent outside. Even the peacocks he raised are sleeping. The only sound anywhere is the warm hum of this electric typewriter and the mechanical rhythm of its key strikes, as clear and certain as gunfire.

In April, Thompson’s widow, Anita, began renting out the writer’s cabin to help support the Hunter S Thompson scholarship for veterans at Columbia University, where both she and Hunter studied. It sits beside the main Thompson home on a 17-hectare estate marked with hoof prints and elk droppings that gradually rises towards a mountain range. A short walk uphill is the spot where Thompson’s ashes were fired into the sky from a 153ft tower in the shape of a “Gonzo fist”, a logo he first adopted during his unsuccessful 1970 campaign to be sheriff of nearby Aspen. Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, picked up the $3m tab for that elaborate sendoff, which took place shortly after Thompson killed himself in 2005.

The command centre … Kevin EG Perry with Anita Thompson at Owl Farm.

 Photograph: Kevin EG Perry

There is still a piece of rebar buried in the ground where the tower once stood. It now marks the heart of a labyrinth, picked out in red rocks that were placed there by Anita several years ago. Walking there during the day, I found myself lulled into a state of meditation. It was reading Thompson as a teenager that made me want to write for a living. Like many, my gateway drug was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his vicious satirical broadside against the American dream that begins with the line: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

There is, I realise now, a certain irony to the fact that a journey beginning with that debauched and hallucinatory tale has brought me to one of the most serene and peaceful places I’ve been. While sitting at the typewriter, I glance out the window and see a lone white-tailed deer standing on the ridge just above Thompson’s cherry-red Pontiac Grand Ville. In the afternoon, Anita shows me around their home, including the kitchen that was once his “command centre”. Another typewriter remains where he left it, engulfed in a snowdrift of books and papers. Indeed, the whole room is largely unchanged, part of Anita’s plans to preserve the home as a museum.

He did have a way of consuming more food, more alcohol and more drugs than anybody I’ve ever seen

She met Thompson in 1997, when he saved her from being mauled by a pair of crazed great danes on the boardwalk of Venice Beach in LA. At least, that’s the way he tells it in his sort-of memoir Kingdom of Fear, published in 2003. In truth, they were introduced by a mutual friend: she had a question about football and the friend thought Thompson, then primarily a sportswriter, would know the answer. She had no idea who he was.

“I was 25 and I had an instant crush on him,” she says. “I’d never met anyone like him. I knew him as Hunter before I knew him as a writer. He was an intense and kind person. When I met him, he wasn’t a wild partier. He wasn’t a Raoul Duke character.” That’s his drug-snorting alter ego, the name he gives himself in Fear and Loathing. “When he was under stress or having a lot of fun, that character would come out, but generally he was just like you and me. Having said that, he did have a way of consuming more food, more alcohol and more drugs than anybody I’ve ever seen – and still be able to function.”

‘One of the great political voices of our time’ … Thompson and his typewriter. 

Photograph: National Geographic Image Collection/Alamy

Anita helped Thompson get back to writing in the last half-decade of his life; he produced as much work in those five years as he had in the previous 15. That included a regular column for sports network ESPN that included a startlingly prescient piece, published the day after 9/11, that predicted the US military follies that would define the decade to come.

In 2001, he also returned to campaigning journalism with his battle to free Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman convicted of murdering a police officer even though she had been handcuffed in the police car when the shot was fired by her companion. The supreme court overturned her conviction two weeks after Thompson died. “It was bittersweet for all of us,” says Anita.

These days, Anita finds herself charged with preserving her husband’s legacy. There have been rumours of TV shows, a film adaptation of his 1983 Hawaiian escapade The Curse of Lono, even a branded cannabis line, but she is understandably cautious. “I try to steer the conversation back to his writing, because there’s always a focus on his lifestyle,” she says. “That’s the clickbait, but it’s the writing that’s important. We need him now more than ever, and his work is so poignant and personal. He’s always in the present moment. In every story, he’s showing you what it felt like, all the smells and sensations. Every time you read a page, it makes you more empowered today, in 2019, whether you’re reading about the 1970s or 2003.”

Echoes … our writer starts his piece on Thompson’s typewriter. 

Photograph: Kevin EG Perry

“Coming over to the cabin was like a mini-vacation for him,” Anita says. “He wrote in his notebook there because the cabin sits next to a brook that runs next to the main room during the summers. It’s very relaxing.”


I have worked as a journalist for the best part of a decade now, and there are elements of Thompson’s mythology I can no longer romanticise. There’s a section of Fear and Loathing that begins with this editor’s note: “The original manuscript is so splintered that we were forced to seek out the original tape recording and transcribe it verbatim.” Any illusion I once held that this was a sort of meta-joke was shattered when I read that it had been written up by Sarah Lazin, an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone in the 70s. “I had done a lot of transcribing in several languages,” she recalled last year in a Vanity Fair piece, “but this was pretty intense. In one of the tapes they’re in this restaurant, and they’re essentially torturing the waitress – yelling and screaming and throwing things – and I had no idea how to transcribe that.”

While that sort of behaviour may make Thompson seem like a relic from a different time, when one could be a nightmare to work with and be forgiven, his writing still resonates – some of it more noisily than ever. Unfortunately, there is nothing outdated about this observation from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: “The main problem in any democracy is that crowdpleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy – then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

A new biography, Freak Kingdom by Timothy Denevi, focuses on Thompson’s incendiary writing in the decade between two seismic events in American politics: the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963 and Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Denevi started writing his book after rereading Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, Thompson’s 1971 Rolling Stone piece about the death of Mexican-American reporter Rubén Salazar at the hands of the LAPD – a story that has obvious resonance both with President Trump’s attacks on immigrant communities and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Out with a bang … Thompson’s ashes hit the sky accompanied by fireworks in August 2005. 

Photograph: Peter Mountain/AP

“Reading that piece, I began to realise that this is one of the great literary political voices of our time,” says Denevi, down the line to the cabin. “He was indicting and attacking those with the most power for their dishonesty. Although I don’t mention Trump or his administration, of course my book was coloured by the present corruption which shines its garbage light upon us all. Thompson understood that power is inseparable from the people who abuse it. That means you have to look at the people who are abusing it to understand its nature and how it can be manipulated, in America especially, to hurt the people who already have the least.”

This isn’t the first time Thompson’s prescience has rung bells. Alex Gibney’s 2008 documentary Gonzo made it clear how easily his work in the 1960s and 70s also applied to the George W Bush era. Here we are again, a decade later. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. “That’s because what Thompson is really writing about is how people abuse the American system to gain more power, and that’s as old as America itself,” says Denevi. “Thompson’s insight is like Mark Twain’s insight, in that it lasts outside of its cultural moment. It’s his logic, perspective and rigour that allows his work to fit into the Bush administration, or Reagan, or now.”

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Having spent roughly half my life reading and rereading Thompson, it is serious fun to come to Owl Farm and hear the sound of his typewriter, moving once again under my fingers. I come away thinking that his voice too, leaping from every page with righteous anger, is still needed.

Before I leave, I tell Anita how meditative I found walking the labyrinth. “It’s a really powerful spot,” she says. “It’s almost like a tattoo. You pin something very painful to the earth and it frees your mind. All labyrinths serve the same purpose, which is to centre you and set you in the present moment. As Hunter said, we only have the present moment, and it’s so easy to get out of it. The future can bring anxiety, the past can bring depression, but right here? Right here is good.”

• The cabin is no longer on Airbnb. New rental details here.

https://uncrate.com/es/article/cabina-de-escritura-de-hunter-s-thompson/

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