Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson was born the first of three sons to Virginia Ray Davison, a local Louisville librarian, and Jack Robert Thompson, an insurance adjustor. Thompson lived a comfortable middle-class life with his family until his father died of a rare neuromuscular disease when Thompson was just 14. Thompson went on to high school in Louisville, but after he was charged as an accessory to robbery in 1955 and sentenced to sixty days in the local jail, he was not allowed to take his final exams and didn’t graduate. That same year, Thompson joined the United States Air Force, and in 1956 he applied to aviation school. His application was ultimately rejected, and Thompson was later stationed in Florida, where he took night classes at Florida State University and wrote for the school newspaper. He received an early honorable discharge from the Air Force in 1957 due to his unruly behavior and inability to follow directions. Thompson briefly lived in New York City and audited courses at Colombia, but by 1960 he was living in Puerto Rico writing for a sports magazine. In 1961, he moved back to the States and lived in Big Sur, California, where his first feature article was published in Rouge magazine. Around this time, Thompson began writing novels, including The Rum Diary about his time in Puerto Rico, but he failed to publish at that time. In 1963, Thompson married Sandra Dawn Conklin, who gave birth to their son, Juan, in 1964. By 1965, Thompson and his family were living in San Francisco, California, where he was active in the American countercultural movement. He took an assignment to write a story about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, and spent an entire year riding and living with them. Thompson’s research of the club gained much attention and he was offered several book deals. Unfortunately, Thompson’s presumed financial success angered the Angels, who demanded half his profits and savagely beat him. During the late sixties, Thompson moved to Colorado, where he ran, unsuccessfully, for Sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970. During his political run, Thompson created gonzo journalism, a form of new journalism that rejects objectivity and instead relies on a first-person account to report any given event. In 1972, Thompson published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to split reviews; however, the book gained popularity with the public throughout the 1970s and has since become an iconic piece of American literature. Thompson spent most of the ‘70s working as a journalist, but he frequently drank and missed deadlines. By 1980, he began to slow down and isolate himself, but he continued to write for Rolling Stone magazine. For most of the 1990s, he worked on a single novel that was never published, and in 2000, he began writing a weekly column for ESPN. Thompson married Anita Bejmuk in 2003, and in 2005, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while at home in Woody Creek, Colorado.