Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs is a book written by Hunter S. Thompson, first published in 1967 by Random House.It was widely lauded for its up-close and uncompromising look at the Hells Angels motorcycle club, during a time when the gang was highly feared and accused of numerous criminal activities. The New York Times described Thompson's portrayal.
Embarrassing ... Hunter S Thompson in 1977. Photograph: Corbis
Two books published this month perpetuate the mythology around Hunter S Thompson, the self-styled inventor of 'gonzo' journalism who blew his brains out in 2005 at the age of 68.
Thompson, May 1989 But Hunter was doing something different. Hunter would use his press card as a sort of ticket to live in another dimension, to make his life into a carnival. An article on June 29 about Hunter S. Thompson described incorrectly the context for a quotation by his widow, Anita Thompson, in which she said he was “surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers.
Gonzo (Ammo Books) is a 'popular edition' of photographs from Thompson's archives, previously available only as an expensive limited edition, and featuring an idolising introduction by the actor Johnny Depp. And the legend is rehashed once more in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Little Brown), an oral history assembled by Rolling Stone's founding editor, Jann Wenner together with Corey Seymour, known as Thompson's 'slave' at the magazine.
Wenner states: 'To print any given fact is to endorse it and give it validity.' He's not wrong and it is high time the accepted facts of the gonzo legacy were challenged.
Thompson liked to quote Voltaire to the effect that 'one owes respect to the living: to the dead one owes only the truth'. And the truth is that Thompson was washed up long before he checked out. By the end of the 1970s his best work was behind him and he spent the 1980s and 90s churning out hack jobs for drug money while playing up to his notorious image.
Only in America in the 1960s and early 70s could a gun-worshipping, atavistic, pill-popping paranoid like Thompson come across as an innocent. With a swindler in the White House, a depraved war being fought for futile reasons, and the American political system infected to the marrow, Thompson appeared to many young people to embody not so much freak power as common sense. It is emblematic of the deranged climate in which Thompson flourished that when Nixon met Mao, it was the American president who was assumed to be the duplicitous character and the Chinese leader who was portrayed as salubrious. As long as Nixon was at the helm, Thompson had his target. Nixon's doom spelt Thompson's ruin.
If the gonzo persona encouraged a generation of impressionable young men to ape Thompson's drug consumption at the expense of any discernible talent, that's hardly the writer's fault. What can be laid at his door is the responsibility for laying spurious claim to the invention of a new literary genre.
The technique of placing oneself at the heart of a story and rejecting the possibility of objective reporting is as old as the Roman Republic but you don't have to be a classicist to find the claims of gonzo journalism bogus. In the New Yorker in the 1940s and 50s, writers such as Joseph Mitchell and AJ Liebling were weaving stories that were the equal of, and often superior to, any fiction. Mitchell's essay Mr Hunter's Grave, written in 1956, remains as vivid as the day it was published. Mitchell begins with an account of his habit of walking in a borough of New York. Gradually he widens the focus to include a singular individual and finally a long-vanished community. It is a beautiful story. In comparison, even the most celebrated of Thompson's pieces - on the Kentucky Derby or the Hell's Angels in San Francisco, for example - seem attenuated. The author's obsession with narcotics and firearms strikes us these days as a bit inane.
Misogyny and homophobia were twin engines which propelled Thompson's souped-up prose (See Fear and Loathing in America where he defends Edward Kennedy's appalling behaviour over the Chappaquiddick incident, while E Jean Carroll's admittedly flawed biography details Thompson's wife-beating and queer-bashing, and outlines his troubled relationship with his gay brother, whom Thompson refused to visit when he was dying of Aids.)
He was indeed a standard-bearer of the 1960s counter culture. In common with Radical Chic, the Grateful Dead and loon pants, gonzo journalism is an embarrassing relic of a time that taste forgot. One critic said that Thompson elicited the same admiration that we would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral. Perhaps it would be kinder to look the other way.
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Preview — Screwjack by Hunter S. Thompson
There was no art in this. Reads like Thompson got lit up on a random cocktail of pills and recorded the nonsense that came out of his mouth during the high. It's not art. It's a tragedy. Any idiot c...more
The first story is by far the strongest and had me howling with intense laughter out of sheer familiar nervousness. The next two stories have great poetic glide to them but lack the intensity of the first.
if only all users can write while they're high
'living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of nothing ever getting to the end of anything.'
There were marijuana seeds all over the rug in my room. Reminds me of that time picking the crab lice off, one by one, and hurling them around the room.
Like my bea...more
Hunter S Thompson Writing
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