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February282005

(3.7.05 issue) Freak power

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: ,

Louis Menand on Hunter S. Thompson:


There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called “The Death of the American Dream,” a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling “Gatsby” “The Death of the Red White and Blue.”

Believer [New Yorker]
GBT's FAQs [story of Uncle Duke, Doonesbury@Slate]
The Hunter S. Thompson interview [Freezerbox]
Hunter Thompson's Political Genius [The Nation]
The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders [Thompson in The Nation, 1965]

3 comments

Comments

Hunter S. thompson got his start at The Nation magazine in the late 1960s when its editor, Carey McWilliams, suggested he cover, for a fee of $100, the mororcycle gangs of California. He did. You can read his original article at the Nation website.

AnonymousFebruary 28, 2005

Hunter S. thompson got his start at The Nation magazine in the late 1960s when its editor, Carey McWilliams, suggested he cover, for a fee of $100, the mororcycle gangs of California. He did. You can read his original article at the Nation website.

AnonymousFebruary 28, 2005

Thanks! Yep, see link above, or here: The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders.

EmdashesFebruary 28, 2005

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