Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky on July 18, 1937. During a two year stint in the Air Force he worked as a sports reporter for the base newspaper. There were two significant pre-occupations that were constant subjects in his writing: sports and politics. His first book, Hell’s Angels, was an inside look at the infamous biker gang and resulted in Thompson getting beaten up by some bikers for his troubles. It was published in 1966 and established him as one of the shining new stars of the New Journalism movement of the ‘60s that included Tom Wolfe, but he refused to be pigeon-holed and carved out with his own unique vision.
The origins for his most famous work — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — started off quite humbly. Thompson was assigned to write captions for a photo-essay on the Mint 400 off-road motorcycle race in Las Vegas for Sports Illustrated magazine. At some point, the editor for Rolling Stone magazine heard that Thompson was in Vegas and asked him to also cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Third Annual Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When Sports Illustrated rejected his work Thompson took the Rolling Stone gig. Objectivity was thrown out the window in favor of a highly personal form of reporting. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was first published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971.
In 1970, Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen as the Freak Power candidate and lost by only a handful of votes after campaigning for the legalization of drugs and for Aspen to be renamed Fat City. Thompson was immortalized in film first by Bill Murray in the cinematic misfire known as Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) and by Johnny Depp in the warped masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Hunter was also the inspiration for Uncle Duke, right down to his trademark aviator sunglasses and cigarette holder, in Garry Trudeau’s popular comic strip, Doonesbury. Thompson was not always crazy about how he was portrayed by others, infamously threatening to disembowel Murray the next time they met and claimed that he would set Trudeau on fire. Over the years he made peace with both men.
