Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson 


by William McKeen


W. W. Norton, 448 pages, $27.95

Conversations With Hunter S. Thompson


Edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson


University Press of Mississippi
, 240 pages, $22

“Well, fuck the Columbia Journalism Review,” Hunter S. Thompson said in a 1974 Playboy interview, responding to a question about CJR’s attacks on his objectivity and credibility. The only hope for the Review, he wrote four years later, in The Great Shark Hunt, would come when “the current editor dies of brain syphilis.” A lot of water’s gone over the dam since then—or else you wouldn’t be reading this—and the scandalous and scurrilous Thompson’s ashes have been launched, according to his wishes, from a custom-designed cannon over his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, to the tune of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

The gala sendoff after his suicide in 2005 cost $2.5 million. The money was put up by his friend Johnny Depp, who played him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam’s here-today-gone-tomorrow film of Thompson’s most enduring book. By then, Thompson had become—to his obvious pleasure, and perhaps to his private consternation—a revered, if still bracingly disreputable, figure in American literature. The term “gonzo,” which he first embraced and then came to dislike, had made it into the Oxford English Dictionary: “A type of committed, subjective journalism characterized by factual distortion and exaggerated rhetorical style.” His friends and admirers included such respectables as George Plimpton, Ed Bradley, Charles Kuralt, and Douglas Brinkley, who became his literary executor. George McGovern was the featured speaker at his funeral. And in The Wall Street Journal (of all places), Tom Wolfe compared him to Mark Twain and judged him “the greatest comic writer of the 20th century.”

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.