Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite writers. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of my favorite movies (and book). He was born in 1937, and lived what I can only imagine to be a very interesting life. He lived across from The Grateful Dead, and the Hell’s Angels, in San Francisco, in the 60’s… How amazing is that! He also had an interesting take on hippies, and wrote;
“The thrust is no longer for ‘change’ or ‘progress’ or ‘revolution’, but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been – perhaps should have been – and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms.”
From “The ‘Hashbury’ is the Capital of the Hippies” the New York times magazine
He ran for mayor of Aspen, Colorado in 1970, and actually was leading the race until right at the end and lost. He wrote an article about the race in the Rolling Stones Magazine I believe, and later said, instead rallying his supporters, it angered and rallied his opponents’ supporters.
Along with his writing, he drank and did a multitude of drugs. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he writes about bringing “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.” I was always quite proud of his inventory, and probably tried to mimic it a few times myself.
He hated Nixon. He was actually at the Watergate, in the bar downstairs… while it was being broken into (above him), coincidentally.
Johnny Depp played him in the Vegas movie (and also The Rum Diary), and said “He just liked to have fun”. Bill Murray also played him in Where the Buffalo Roam in 1980. All fantastic pieces of art.
You know you have lived an interesting life if Bill Murray, and Johnny Depp play you in the movies.
He died in 2005 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 67 years old.
If you wonder if he’s gone to Heaven or Hell, rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and Peacocks ..
Ralph Steadman
