I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
- Hunter S. Thompson
The Early years
A Louisville, Kentucky native, Thompson grew up in the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood of the Highlands. He was the first son of parents Jack Robert (1893 – July 3, 1952), an insurance adjuster and a U.S. Army veteran who served in France during World War I, and Virginia Davidson Ray (1908 – 1998), a reference librarian and secretary who, while a student at the University of Michigan, had joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. Introduced by a mutual friend from Jack's fraternity in 1934, they had married in 1935.
Jack died of myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease on July 3, 1952 when Hunter was 14 years old, leaving three sons — Hunter, Davison, and James (1949 – 1994) — to be brought up by their mother. Contemporaries described Virginia after Jack's death as a "heavy drinker."
Interested in sports and athletically inclined from a young age, Thompson joined Louisville's Castlewood Athletic Club, a sports club for teenagers that prepared them for high school sports, where he excelled in baseball though he never joined any sports teams in high school. He was constantly in trouble at school.
The Birth of Gonzo
In 1970, Thompson wrote an article entitled The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved for the short-lived new journalism magazine Scanlan's Monthly. Although it was not widely read at the time, the article is the first of Thompson's to use techniques of Gonzo journalism, a style he would later employ in almost every literary endeavor. The manic, first-person subjectivity of the story was reportedly the result of Thompson's sheer desperation; he was facing a looming deadline and started sending the magazine pages ripped out of his notebook. Ralph Steadman, who would later collaborate with Thompson on several projects, contributed expressionist pen and ink illustrations.
The first use of the word Gonzo to describe Thompson's work is credited to the journalist Bill Cardoso. Cardoso had first met Thompson on a bus full of journalists covering the 1968 New Hampshire Primary. In 1970, Cardoso (who, by this time had become the editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine) wrote to Thompson praising the "Kentucky Derby" piece in Scanlan's Monthly as a breakthrough: "This is it, this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling." Thompson took to the word right away, and according to illustrator Ralph Steadman said "Okay, that's what I do. Gonzo."
Thompson's first published use of the word Gonzo appears in a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream: "Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism."
The Later Years
1980 marked both his divorce from Sandra Conklin and the release of Where the Buffalo Roam, a loose film adaptation of situations from Thompson's early 1970s work, with Bill Murray starring as the author. After the lukewarm reception of the film, Thompson temporarily relocated to Hawaii to work on a novel. The Curse of Lono was a gonzo-style account of a marathon in the state that was extensively illustrated by Ralph Steadman, first appearing in Running magazine in 1981 as "The Charge of the Weird Brigade" and before being excerpted in Playboy in 1983.
On July 21, 1981, in Aspen, Colorado, Thompson ran a stop sign at 2 am and began to "rave" at a state trooper. He also refused to take alcohol tests. Because of his refusal he was detained, although during a trial the drunk-driving charges against the journalist were dropped because there was no basis for the charges.
In 1983, he covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada but would not discuss these experiences until the publication of Kingdom of Fear 20 years later. Later that year he authored a piece for Rolling Stone called "A Dog Took My Place," an exposé of the scandalous Roxanne Pulitzer divorce and what he termed the "Palm Beach lifestyle." The article contained dubious insinuations of bestiality (among other things) but was considered to be a return to proper form by many.
Shortly thereafter, Thompson accepted an advance to write about "couples pornography" for Playboy. As part of his research, he spent time at the O'Farrell Theater strip club in San Francisco and his experience there eventually evolved into a full-length nonfiction novel tentatively titled The Night Manager. Neither the novel nor the article ever materialized, and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen erroneously reported that Thompson was "working as the O'Farrell's night manager". By the early 1990s Thompson was said to be working on a fictional novel called Polo Is My Life, which was briefly excerpted in Rolling Stone in 1994, and which Hunter himself described in 1996 as "...a sex book — you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's about the manager of a sex theater who's forced to leave and flee to the mountains. He falls in love and gets in even more trouble than he was in the sex theater in San Francisco". The novel was slated to be released by Random House in 1999, and was even assigned ISBN 0679406948, but was never actually published.