RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Hunter S. Thompson dead

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DENVER (AP) -- Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like "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.

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 told the AP 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 "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."

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.

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rex said:
The best part of this is that my hippie sister loves him. I'm at her house right now watching her kids. I can't wait until she gets home and I tell her the news.

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so angry

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the G-man said:
I always it thought it was interesting that hippies loved him so much, but at the same time he was a real gun nut.

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the G-man said:
No, he was more like John Kerry, if Kerry came back from Nam crazy and drug addled:

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backwards7 said:
I'm surprised Hunter shot himself because he didn't seem the type. Maybe he was ill and didn't want to waste away.

Like Jack Kerouac before him, he had the ability to vividly capture the moment in his prose. You can read his books and articles, particularly his early work, and decades later it's still fresh and full of energy. You can feel the combined forces of the times in which these pieces were written and Hunter's own personality coming through in the writing. A difficult thing to do well.

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All hippie shit aside, the man was fucking dauntless. I can NOT see him taking his own life.

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The widow of US writer Hunter S Thompson has said her husband killed himself while they were speaking to one another on the telephone.
Thompson - best-known for his 1972 account of a drug-addled Nevada trip, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - shot himself on Sunday at his Colorado home.

His widow, Anita Thompson, 32, told the Aspen Daily News she heard the "clicking of the gun".

She said: "I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and did it."

Mrs Thompson said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly column, but instead of saying goodbye, he shot himself.

She added that she heard a loud, muffled noise, but did not know what had happened.

"I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.

Supportive

Thompson, who was a leading political journalist and one of the most important US authors of the 20th century, was found dead by his son, Juan.

The 67-year-old shot himself in the head in the kitchen while his son, daughter-in-law and six-year-old grandson were in the house.

Mrs Thompson told the newspaper her husband had repeatedly talked about killing himself in the months running up to his death.

He had also left verbal and written instructions about what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished works and his assets.

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," she added.

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The 67-year-old shot himself in the head in the kitchen while his son, daughter-in-law and six-year-old grandson were in the house.

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Animalman said:
Somewhat similar to Chuck Palahniuk, who I also have mixed feelings about. I just don't think coming up with the most fucked up thing you can makes you a great writer.

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Gonzo Writer Thompson's Ashes Blast Off

By ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer
31 minutes ago


WOODY CREEK, Colo. - With a deafening boom, the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson were blown into the sky amid fireworks late Saturday as relatives and a star-studded crowd bid an irreverent farewell to the founder of "gonzo journalism."

As the ashes erupted from a tower, red, white, blue and green fireworks lit up the sky over Thompson's home near Aspen.

"I'll always remember where I was when Hunter was blown into the heavens," said Thompson's neighbor, Rita Sherman, who watched the spectacle from the deck of her house.

The 15-story tower was modeled after Thompson's logo: a clenched fist, made symmetrical with two thumbs, rising from the hilt of a dagger. It was built between his home and a tree-covered canyon wall, not far from a tent filled with merrymakers.

"He loved explosions," explained his wife, Anita Thompson.


In this handout image provided by the Thompson family fireworks carrying the ashes of the late Hunter S. Thompson explode over the top of his memorial on the Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colo. Saturday
Photo: AP


The private celebration included actors Bill Murray and Johnny Depp, rock bands, blowup dolls and plenty of liquor to honor Thompson, who killed himself six months ago at the age of 67.

Security guards kept reporters and the public away from the compound as the 250 invited guests arrived, but Thompson's fans scouted the surrounding hills for the best view of the celebration.

"We just threw a gallon of Wild Turkey in the back and headed west," said Kevin Coy of Chester, W.Va., who drove more than 1,500 miles with a friend in hopes of seeing the celebration. "We came to pay our respects."

Thompson fatally shot himself in his kitchen Feb. 20, apparently despondent over his declining health. The memorial, however, was planned as a party, with readings and scheduled performances by both Lyle Lovett and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

The author's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman, and actor Sean Penn were on the invitation list, along with Depp, who portrayed Thompson in the 1998 movie version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," perhaps the writer's best-known work.

"Over the last few months I've learned that he really touched people more deeply than I had realized," said Thompson's son, Juan.

Thompson's longtime friend George Stranahan lamented the Hollywood-style production. "I am pretty sure it isn't how Hunter would have done it," he said. "But when your friends make a mistake you support them."

Anita Thompson said Depp funded much of the celebration.

"We had talked a couple of times about his last wishes to be shot out of a cannon of his own design," Depp told The Associated Press last month. "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."

Thompson is credited along with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism — he dubbed his version "gonzo journalism" — in which the writer was an essential component of the story.

He often portrayed himself as wildly intoxicated as he reported on figures such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. At the height of the Watergate era, he said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character."

Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas — in which the central character was a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant — he also wrote an expose on the Hell's Angels and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72."

The Kentucky-born writer also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury."

In now-chic Aspen, Thompson was an eccentricity: He proudly fired his guns whenever he wanted, let peacocks have the run of the land and ran for sheriff in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner.

Composer David Amram, a friend of Thompson since the early 1960s, said Thompson had never expected to be successful taking on President Nixon during the Watergate era. "He thought he would be banned or put on an enemies' list," he said.

Thompson made himself the centerpiece of his stories "to show that a regular person could be in the midst of the craziness of the time," Amram said. "He was our historian."

After his suicide, one close acquaintance suggested Thompson did not want old age to dictate the circumstances of his death. Anita Thompson said no suicide note was left.

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• Neither mescaline nor LSD were available at the concession stand of the theater where I saw Alex Gibney's new documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, so I had to make do with a couple of cold Coronas.
  
  This dearth of hallucinogenic enhancement may explain why the film seemed to suffer from an excess of politics and a shortage of laughter. Or maybe not.
  
  Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, his anti-war film about the death of a Guantanamo Bay detainee, seems determined to force the square peg of Thompson idiosyncrasies into the round hole of contemporary liberal passions. It's an awkward fit. At times, Gonzo seems more like a celebration of George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign than of Thompson's journalism career.
  
  The film offers no explanation of how Thompson, who originally dreamed of being a novelist, drifted into journalism as a sportswriter for the Eglin Air Force Base newspaper. There is only passing reference to his formative years as a freelance Latin American correspondent for the National Observer.
  
  Instead, Gibney's Thompson seems to transform almost instantly from his adolescence in Louisville, Kentucky, into the author of Hell's Angels, the 1967 bestseller that began as a 1965 feature article for the Nation. The filmgoer who knows nothing of Thompson's earlier work (Nation editor Carey McWilliams was a fan of Thompson's reporting in the Observer), is left to wonder why a leading liberal magazine would have picked him for the Hell's Angels assignment.
  
  Arguably the best part of Gibney's documentary is its portrayal of the most distinctly subjective episode of Thompson's career: His 1970 campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the "Freak Power" ticket.
  
  From there, Gibney turns to the difficult task of limning the origins of the purely subjective "gonzo" style that Thompson first used in a 1970 article, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," then developed most famously in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, originally published by Rolling Stone in two parts in 1971.
  
  Gibney's film almost completely ignores the last two decades of the writer's life.
  
  Gonzo cuts directly from Thompson's years in the late '70s hanging out with Jimmy Buffet in Key West to his 2005 suicide at his cabin near Aspen. In doing so, Gibney skips over Thompson's coverage of the 1982 Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial, his years as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, his final gig as a columnist for ESPN.com, and his long legal crusade to free Lisa Auman, who'd been sentenced to life in prison as an accessory to a 1997 murder.
  
  Gibney's shortchanging of Thompson's later career reflects the narrative of the biography (also entitled Gonzo) that Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour published last fall. Wenner's portrayal of Thompson's final years as a "humiliating" afterthought angered his widow, Anita, who married him in 2003 after three years as his editorial assistant.
  
  Despite its flaws, Gibney's film still fascinates, if only because Thompson's larger-than-life personality was so inherently fascinating. A boring documentary about Thompson would be impossible, and as long as Gonzo remains focused on its subject -- rather than indulging in romanticized '60s nostalgia -- it compels attention, even without a brain full of mescaline.