Rachel York

CNMS Major

Eleven years ago, on February 20th 2005, the world lost a great character. Hunter S. Thompson was an American author and journalist who founded the movement known today as Gonzo journalism.

The term ‘gonzo’ was first used to describe the style of writing in one of his articles in 1970. It is described as an exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalized style. Often in Gonzo journalism the writer is included in the article. The elements are part fiction, part experience.

One of the most popular examples of this style of writing is his 1971 book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, which was later made into a successful movie starring Johnny Depp in 1998.

Thompson was an activist as well an author. He was a counterculture icon, especially popular among college students for his lifestyle of drug use and firearms.

His antithetic lifestyle began early. While growing up in Louisville, Kentucky he was arrested for theft and given the option of going to prison or joining the military. He chose to join the United States Air Force in 1956, where he first began his work in journalism as a sports section editor for an Air Force newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

After being honorably discharged from the Air Force in 1957, he continued to pursue journalism as a career path, where eventually his story on the Kentucky Derby received a great amount of attention as a breakthrough for the gonzo journalism movement.

Throughout his career, he wrote novels from his experiences as a freelance journalist working in Puerto Rico to his research of the Hell’s Angels. He was especially interested in anything that had to do with the hypocrisy in America.

Not only was he involved in journalism, he was also strongly involved in politics in America, and ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970 without success. But, his writings about the campaign became his first work published in Rolling Stone magazine, where he then worked as the national affairs editor until 1999.

After fighting many health battles, Thompson took his life on his property in Woody Creek, Colorado in February of 2005. In August, per request, his ashes were shot from a cannon at a private ceremony to the song “Mr. Tambourine Man” honoring his life.

Thompson will forever be remembered for his passion in his writing and his notorious anti-authoritarian lifestyle. He had a way of expressing himself and the world around him beautifully and raw. He viewed the world through a different kind of lens that was completely unclouded. His life was a wild work of art that was expressed through his writing. Journalism would not have differed from its path into previously uncharted territories if it was not for the work of this man.