Hunter s thompson who is he

The work he remains best known for, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream , constitutes a rumination on the failure of the s counterculture movement.

It was first serialized in Rolling Stone , a magazine with which Thompson would be long associated, and was released as a film starring Johnny Depp and directed by Terry Gilliam in Politically minded, Thompson ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in , on the Freak Power ticket.

He was also known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. While suffering a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of Per his wishes, his ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend Johnny Depp and attended by a host of friends including then Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson.

Skip to main content. In , it became a film starring Johnny Depp. Thompson was also reshaping what it meant to write about politics. He filed 14 dispatches for Rolling Stone from the presidential campaign trail. But getting work out of Thompson was becoming difficult.

The magazine put him up at hotels in San Francisco or Florida, and stocked his room with booze, grapefruit and speed. He would often call Wenner at 2 a. In correspondence between Thompson and Wenner, Thompson demanded albums and speed; Wenner chastised him for blowing deadlines, keeping the staff late and even stealing cassettes from his house.

Thompson had become a celebrity — and it slowed him down. He was immortalized as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury. In , Thompson traveled to a failing Saigon for a planned epic Vietnam piece, but he spent most of his time there drinking in the hotel courtyard with other correspondents. He conducted several interviews with Jimmy Carter that the former president remembered as lengthy and revealing, but Thompson lost the tapes.

Still, there were flashes of brilliance, such as his coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial in Palm Beach, Florida, which summed up the Eighties culture of greed as it was still taking form.

Thompson wrote one final piece for Rolling Stone , in In an uncharacteristically humble tone, he made a plea to readers to vote. A month later, Brinkley reported that Thompson got into a shouting match with his wife, Anita Thompson, after he nearly shot her with a pellet gun.

They made up the next day, but when she phoned Thompson from a nearby health club, she heard strange clicking noises.

After she hung up, he put a. An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections as Generation of Swine and Songs of the Doomed. His first ever novel, The Rum Diary, written in , was first published in Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era, and once said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character.

The writer's compound in Woody Creek, not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons; in , he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, trying to chase a bear off his property. He later became a proud member of the National Rifle Association and almost was elected sheriff in Aspen in under the Freak Power Party banner.

Thompson's heyday came in the s, when his larger-than-life persona was gobbled up by magazines. His pieces were of legendary length and so was his appetite for adventure and trouble; his purported fights with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner were rumoured in many cases to hinge on expense accounts for stories that did not materialise.