Hunter S Thompson, 1939–2005

Hunter S Thompson, the American counterculture writer, has been found dead at his home in Colorado. Thompson's son, Juan, found his body. He said the 67-year-old shot himself. BBC News

Thompson was an icon of the 1960s counter-culture and was best known for his rapid-fire, first-person style of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Hells Angels." The Aspen Times

Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism _ or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" _ in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. "Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist," Thompson told the AP in 2003. "You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it." An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998. 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." SFGate

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine. "I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody." Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids." NYT

Very sad news. Thompson hadn't written much of interest lately -- though he did turn out the occasional column accurately registering the utter vileness of the Bush regime and of America's lurch toward xenophobia, repression, and willful ignornace -- and it might even be said that in his later years he became, as a writer, a living parody of himself, his paranoid content and the lurid rhetoric having become all too predictable reflexes. But at his best, and very much so in his earlier years, he definitely was a great writer. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remains a masterpiece, an absolutely brilliant, savage, and hilarious decoding of the American Dream, the only work of "New Journalism" that (unlike the tomes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) has outlived the times in which it was written. Much of his other journalism from the 1960s and 1970s is nearly as good. Thompson was well-nigh definitive on Richard Nixon. All in all, he was the conscience of his times: times that were more accurately represented by his "gonzo" excesses than they could have been by any more conventional, naturalistic, and restrained mode of reportage. The Pinocchio Theory