hunter s thompson 911 essay

Hunter S. Thompson's 9/11 Essay Is Still Chillingly Accurate 16 Years Later

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, no one knew exactly what the future would hold.

However, writer Hunter S. Thompson turned out to be amazingly prescient.

Shortly after the tragedy, the famed gonzo journalist wrote an essay for ESPN.com where he laid out his thoughts on what could happen in this new era.

Sixteen years later, his remarks are still chillingly accurate:

“Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.”

Thompson wrote that the United States is “going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say.”

He continued:

“Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.”

Thompson, who died in 2005 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, also laid out how then-President George W. Bush would react to the attack and how his decisions would affect the lives of everyday Americans.

“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. “ He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job ― armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.”

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16 Years Later, Hunter S. Thompson’s 9/11 Essay Is Still Shockingly Accurate

It’s weird to think about what life was like before the tragedy on September 11th, 2001. The post-9/11 world is completely different, and not just because of the TSA. No one could predict what the next sixteen years and one day would have in store. Well, no one but Hunter S. Thompson, apparently.   We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows?    At the time, the Gonzo journalist …

It’s weird to think about what life was like before the tragedy on September 11th, 2001. The post-9/11 world is completely different, and not just because of the TSA. No one could predict what the next sixteen years and one day would have in store. Well, no one but Hunter S. Thompson, apparently.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? 

At the time, the Gonzo journalist was a Page 2 columnist for ESPN . The Monday after 9/11, Thompson deviated from his regularly scheduled programming and devoted his column to the tragedy. Fans of Thompson’s work won’t be surprised at the essay. In typical gonzo fashion, it’s less about the attack itself and more focused on the abstract and unknown future which we have since lived through. 

And that future’s pretty accurate.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. 

Scary, isn’t it?

Read the entirety of Hunter S. Thompson’s 9/11 essay here .

Featured image via Open Culture.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — 9/11 — Hunter S. Thompson and 9/11: Predictions and Reflections

Hunter S. Thompson and 9/11: Predictions and Reflections

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Published: Sep 12, 2023

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Thompson's predictions and their fruition, thompson's reflections on 9/11.

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Amy Abdelsayed

Writer, storyteller, journalist in las vegas, essay: hunter s. thompson and the american dream.

• by Amy Abdelsayed
• Posted on March 29, 2012 October 18, 2021

By Amy Abdelsayed

Like so many other Americans, I am from a family of immigrants.

My Egyptian grandparents came to this country with their three sons when my father was just a boy. None of them spoke English and they were very poor, but that didn’t matter. They were starting a new life in a country where even the poorest of the poor, if they worked hard enough, could achieve wealth and comfort. They fantasized about being characters of triumph in a “rags to riches” story told in the style of Horatio Alger – my grandparents were on a journey to reach the American Dream.

In 1971, American journalist Hunter S. Thompson went on his own journey to discover the American Dream.

In his book  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  Thompson uses Gonzo journalism to document and share his drug-induced experience traveling through 1970s Las Vegas. Throughout the book, he references and mocks the traditional ideals of Horatio Alger and takes stab at American consumerism and our cultural, overwhelming need to indulge.

But why did Thompson choose to search for the American Dream in Las Vegas? Why not choose a suburban town somewhere in the midwest where white picket fences are plentiful and families play outside in the yard with their golden retrievers?

For starters, the birth of Las Vegas parallels the birth of the United States.

The U.S. was founded by immigrants and minorities, people who migrated to this country in hopes of escaping religious and political oppression, poverty and just about anything else that can make one a misfit. America was founded by rebels and oddballs. The country’s history is based on rebellion against England and the innovative minds who thought differently from the norm during the 1600s, the 1700s and beyond. 

And just like a Russian Babushka doll, within this country of misfits hid a smaller community of misfits from the misfits. It came equipped with casinos for gambling and showgirls for entertainment. Las Vegas has broken all the rules since its birth in 1905 and growth in the 1920s and 1930s, and it continues to attract the rebels and weirdoes of the United States to this day.

Thompson uses this to his advantage. When Duke and his attorney first arrive in Las Vegas, they are tripping out on hallucinogens. He writes about checking in at the front desk of their hotel and the encounter Duke and his attorney have with the employee who helps them: “The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices  an acid freak” (p. 24). 

Welcome to Las Vegas.

The woman at the front desk never notices they are on drugs. Nobody questions their behavior. From the start, Thompson shows that two men on a mind-bending, psychedelic trip blend right in with Vegas society and culture.

Later, he goes on to say that “Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers… house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd” (p. 41). 

This brings me to my next point; the early inhabitants of Las Vegas created their own rules and precedents of what would be acceptable that have carried over to today – much like the framers of the Constitution did for America. Yes, Las Vegas is bound by the same federal laws as any other city, but surely it’s easier to get away with more when you’re in Sin City limits.

Thompson writes, “In a closed society where everyone is guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity” (p. 72).

Everybody does what they want in Las Vegas. Everybody is guilty of something. Thompson is aware that everyone is breaking the rules, but believes that people in Vegas are not out to get you. They keep to themselves.

What good are the rules if they are not enforced?

He writes, “This is one of the Hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. Only bedrock rule is Don’t Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big” (p. 106).

Ah, money. That brings me to my third point.

The core of Horatio Alger’s American Dream is that anybody can build a life for themselves and will reach success as long as they work hard, be honest and follow a moral path. The characters in Alger’s books took years of honest hard work before they felt the positive consequences of their actions. His stories had a moral undertone.

And yet, here is Thompson writing about his quest for the American Dream in Las Vegas, a city which thrives on gambling. In Vegas, with a little bit of luck, any Joe Schmoe off the street can strike the big bucks in a matter of minutes. Seconds, even. Winners could be rapists, murderers, kidnapers, liars, thieves, whatever – all it takes is the right gamble. What a slap in the face to Horatio Alger. It’s like Thompson is saying screw your fluffy moral bedtime stories and welcome to the real world. Welcome to Las Vegas. Welcome to America.

At the beginning of the book, Duke goes out to the casinos at around 3 a.m. Thompson writes, “Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino” (p. 57).

Fear and Loathing , from the very beginning to the end, is one totally twisted, messed up version of Horatio Alger’s American Dream. Think Ragged Dick (1868) set in the heart of the American drug culture and tripped out on acid.

Thompson’s version of the American Dream is far darker then Alger’s, but I also think it is more accurate. What is the final product of the American Dream anyway, what is the goal?

If it is to go from having nothing to having something, then Duke and his attorney surely found the American Dream before the book even started. Right away on page one; the two are already driving around in a Red Chevy convertible on their way to check in at a Las Vegas suite.

Throughout the book they spend money frivolously. Duke charges things to credit cards with no intention of ever paying them off. Duke and his attorney buy junk just to buy it and trash luxury items without an ounce of guilt: going from one convertible rental and destroying it to another one, or hopping from hotel suite to the next leaving everywhere they stay a gross neglected mess.

By setting the stage in Las Vegas, Thompson puts the American Dream in perspective. The things we strive for and the lifestyle we want, the one that we think every hard working American deserves, is really unnecessary.

He writes about knowing that he is blowing his money and spending in excess:

“I went back to the airport souvenir counter and spent the rest of my cash on garbage – complete shit, souvenirs of Las Vegas, plastic fake-Zippo-lighters with built-in roulette wheel for $6.95, JFK half-dollar money clips for $5 each, tin apes that shook dice for $7.50… I loaded up on this crap, then carried it out to the Great Red Shark and dumped it in the back seat… and then I stepped into the driver’s seat in a very dignified way (the white top was rolled back, as always) and I sat there and turned the radio on and began thinking. How would Horatio Alger handle this situation?” (p. 69-70) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What are we striving for? The whole idea of achieving the American Dream, in the end, is laughed at.

Thompson pokes fun at American consumerism which is, at some level, the heart of the American dream. We want money so we can buy things . Things we don’t even need or don’t appreciate. Las Vegas, as a city, is the prime example of excessive spending on ridiculous things.

Horatio Alger told motivational stories that inspired an optimistic way of thinking. He encouraged immigrants to work hard with the knowledge that eventually they would find their way in this land of opportunity.

A little over a century later, Hunter S. Thompson went to Las Vegas and surfaced a darker truth. If you want to find the American Dream, your best bet is to take some Ambien and fall asleep.

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Author: Amy Abdelsayed

Amy Abdelsayed is a journalist in Las Vegas, NV. She currently works as a digital content producer for KTNV 13 Action News (ABC affiliate). Previous work experience includes What's On Magazine, Boulder City Review, KSNV News 3 (NBC affiliate), Tesla and Apple. View all posts by Amy Abdelsayed

10 thoughts

Amazing analysis of H.S.T. vision of the American dream, well done.

Hey, thanks a lot!

Agreed with Beebs. Incredibly well written. Nicely done.

Reading this as a college student and you hit every main point! This helped a lot! Thank you!!

That’s wonderful! Thank you for reading. This is actually a paper I wrote in college after reading the book for the first time.

This is a great analysis of the Book! Great Job!

Thank you. I appreciate the feedback. Thanks for taking the time to read it!

The book makes a lot more sense, thanks!

Hi Liam! Thank you for reading my essay!

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Advertisement

Hunter s. thompson , the art of journalism no. 1, issue 156, fall 2000.

In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s  The Fountainhead , Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. . . .”

Thompson carved out his niche early. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs—all of which ended badly—before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion.

Thompson completed  The Rum Diary , his only novel to date, before he turned twenty-five; bought by Ballantine Books, it finally was published—to glowing reviews—in 1998. In 1967, Thompson published his first nonfiction book, Hell’s Angels, a harsh and incisive firsthand investigation into the infamous motorcycle gang then making the heartland of America nervous.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , which first appeared in Rolling Stone in November 1971, sealed Thompson’s reputation as an outlandish stylist successfully straddling the line between journalism and fiction writing. As the subtitle warns, the book tells of “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” in full-tilt gonzo style—Thompson’s hilarious first-person approach—and is accented by British illustrator Ralph Steadman’s appropriate drawings.

His next book,  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 , was a brutally perceptive take on the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential campaign. A self-confessed political junkie, Thompson chronicled the 1992 presidential campaign in  Better than Sex  (1994). Thompson’s other books include  The Curse of Lono  (1983), a bizarre South Seas tale, and three collections of Gonzo Papers:  The Great Shark Hunt  (1979),  Generation of Swine  (1988) and  Songs of the Doomed  (1990).

In 1997,  The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 , the first volume of Thompson’s correspondence with everyone from his mother to Lyndon Johnson, was published. The second volume of letters,  Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976, has just been released.

Located in the mostly posh neighborhood of western Colorado’s Woody Creek Canyon, ten miles or so down-valley from Aspen, Owl Farm is a rustic ranch with an old-fashioned Wild West charm. Although Thompson’s beloved peacocks roam his property freely, it’s the flowers blooming around the ranch house that provide an unexpected high-country tranquility. Jimmy Carter, George McGovern and Keith Richards, among dozens of others, have shot clay pigeons and stationary targets on the property, which is a designated Rod and Gun Club and shares a border with the White River National Forest. Almost daily, Thompson leaves Owl Farm in either his Great Red Shark Convertible or Jeep Grand Cherokee to mingle at the nearby Woody Creek Tavern.

Visitors to Thompson’s house are greeted by a variety of sculptures, weapons, boxes of books and a bicycle before entering the nerve center of Owl Farm, Thompson’s obvious command post on the kitchen side of a peninsula counter that separates him from a lounge area dominated by an always-on Panasonic TV, always tuned to news or sports. An antique upright piano is piled high and deep enough with books to engulf any reader for a decade. Above the piano hangs a large Ralph Steadman portrait of “Belinda”—the Slut Goddess of Polo. On another wall covered with political buttons hangs a Che Guevara banner acquired on Thompson’s last tour of Cuba. On the counter sits an IBM Selectric typewriter—a Macintosh computer is set up in an office in the back wing of the house.

The most striking thing about Thompson’s house is that it isn’t the weirdness one notices first: it’s the words. They’re everywhere—handwritten in his elegant lettering, mostly in fading red Sharpie on the blizzard of bits of paper festooning every wall and surface: stuck to the sleek black leather refrigerator, taped to the giant TV, tacked up on the lampshades; inscribed by others on framed photos with lines like, “For Hunter, who saw not only fear and loathing, but hope and joy in ’72—George McGovern”; typed in IBM Selectric on reams of originals and copies in fat manila folders that slide in piles off every counter and table top; and noted in many hands and inks across the endless flurry of pages.

Thompson extricates his large frame from his ergonomically correct office chair facing the TV and lumbers over graciously to administer a hearty handshake or kiss to each caller according to gender, all with an easy effortlessness and unexpectedly old-world way that somehow underscores just who is in charge.

We talked with Thompson for twelve hours straight. This was nothing out of the ordinary for the host: Owl Farm operates like an eighteenth-century salon, where people from all walks of life congregate in the wee hours for free exchanges about everything from theoretical physics to local water rights, depending on who’s there. Walter Isaacson, managing editor of  Time , was present during parts of this interview, as were a steady stream of friends. Given the very late hours Thompson keeps, it is fitting that the most prominently posted quote in the room, in Thompson’s hand, twists the last line of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “Rage, rage against the coming of the light.”

For most of the half-day that we talked, Thompson sat at his command post, chain-smoking red Dunhills through a German-made gold-tipped cigarette filter and rocking back and forth in his swivel chair. Behind Thompson’s sui generis personality lurks a trenchant humorist with a sharp moral sensibility. His exaggerated style may defy easy categorization, but his career-long autopsy on the death of the American dream places him among the twentieth century’s most exciting writers. The comic savagery of his best work will continue to electrify readers for generations to come.

. . . I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the  Book of Revelation  than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Well, wanting to and having to are two different things. Originally I hadn’t thought about writing as a solution to my problems. But I had a good grounding in literature in high school. We’d cut school and go down to a café on Bardstown Road where we would drink beer and read and discuss Plato’s parable of the cave. We had a literary society in town, the Athenaeum; we met in coat and tie on Saturday nights. I hadn’t adjusted too well to society—I was in jail for the night of my high school graduation—but I learned at the age of fifteen that to get by you had to find the one thing you can do better than anybody else . . . at least this was so in my case. I figured that out early. It was writing. It was the rock in my sock. Easier than algebra. It was always work, but it was always worthwhile work. I was fascinated early by seeing my byline in print. It was a rush. Still is.

When I got to the Air Force, writing got me out of trouble. I was assigned to pilot training at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola in northwest Florida, but I was shifted to electronics . . . advanced, very intense, eight-month school with bright guys . . . I enjoyed it but I wanted to get back to pilot training. Besides, I’m afraid of electricity. So I went up there to the base education office one day and signed up for some classes at Florida State. I got along well with a guy named Ed and I asked him about literary possibilities. He asked me if I knew anything about sports, and I said that I had been the editor of my high-school paper. He said, “Well, we might be in luck.” It turned out that the sports editor of the base newspaper, a staff sergeant, had been arrested in Pensacola and put in jail for public drunkenness, pissing against the side of a building; it was the third time and they wouldn’t let him out.

So I went to the base library and found three books on journalism. I stayed there reading them until it closed. Basic journalism. I learned about headlines, leads: who, when, what, where, that sort of thing. I barely slept that night. This was my ticket to ride, my ticket to get out of that damn place. So I started as an editor. Boy, what a joy. I wrote long Grantland Rice-type stories. The sports editor of my hometown  Louisville Courier Journal  always had a column, left-hand side of the page. So I started a column.

By the second week I had the whole thing down. I could work at night. I wore civilian clothes, worked off base, had no hours, but I worked constantly. I wrote not only for the base paper,  The Command Courier , but also the local paper,  The Playground News . I’d put things in the local paper that I couldn’t put in the base paper. Really inflammatory shit. I wrote for a professional wrestling newsletter. The Air Force got very angry about it. I was constantly doing things that violated regulations. I wrote a critical column about how Arthur Godfrey, who’d been invited to the base to be the master of ceremonies at a firepower demonstration, had been busted for shooting animals from the air in Alaska. The base commander told me: “Goddamn it, son, why did you have to write about Arthur Godfrey that way?”

When I left the Air Force I knew I could get by as a journalist. So I went to apply for a job at  Sports Illustrated . I had my clippings, my bylines, and I thought that was magic . . . my passport. The personnel director just laughed at me. I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve been sports editor for  two  papers.” He told me that their writers were judged not by the work they’d done, but where they’d done it. He said, “Our writers are all Pulitzer Prize winners from  The New York Times . This is a helluva place for you to  start . Go out into the boondocks and improve yourself.”

I was shocked. After all, I’d broken the Bart Starr story.

INTERVIEWER

What was that?

At Eglin Air Force Base we always had these great football teams. The Eagles. Championship teams. We could beat up on the University of Virginia. Our bird-colonel Sparks wasn’t just any yo-yo coach. We recruited. We had these great players serving their military time in ROTC. We had Zeke Bratkowski, the Green Bay quarterback. We had Max McGee of the Packers. Violent, wild, wonderful drunk. At the start of the season McGee went AWOL, appeared at the Green Bay camp and he never came back. I was somehow blamed for his leaving. The sun fell out of the firmament. Then the word came that we were getting Bart Starr, the All-American from Alabama. The Eagles were going to roll! But then the staff sergeant across the street came in and said, “I’ve got a terrible story for you. Bart Starr’s not coming.” I managed to break into an office and get out his files. I printed the order that showed he was being discharged medically. Very serious leak.

The Bart Starr story was not enough to impress  Sports Illustrated ?

The personnel guy there said, “Well, we do have this trainee program.” So I became a kind of copy boy.

You eventually ended up in San Francisco. With the publication in 1967 of  Hell’s Angels , your life must have taken an upward spin.

All of a sudden I had a book out. At the time I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t even get a job driving a cab in San Francisco, much less writing. Sure, I had written important articles for  The Nation  and  The Observer , but only a few good journalists really knew my byline. The book enabled me to buy a brand new BSA 650 Lightning, the fastest motorcycle ever tested by  Hot Rod  magazine. It validated everything I had been working toward. If  Hell’s Angels  hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  or anything else. To be able to earn a living as a freelance writer in this country is damned hard; there are very few people who can do that.  Hell’s Angels  all of a sudden proved to me that, Holy Jesus, maybe I can do this. I knew I was a good journalist. I knew I was a good writer, but I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing.

With the swell of creative energy flowing throughout the San Francisco scene at the time, did you interact with or were you influenced by any other writers?

Ken Kesey for one. His novels  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  and  Sometimes a Great Notion  had quite an impact on me. I looked up to him hugely. One day I went down to the television station to do a roundtable show with other writers, like Kay Boyle, and Kesey was there. Afterwards we went across the street to a local tavern and had several beers together. I told him about the Angels, who I planned to meet later that day, and I said, “Well, why don’t you come along?” He said, “Whoa, I’d  like  to meet these guys.” Then I got second thoughts, because it’s never a good idea to take strangers along to meet the Angels. But I figured that this was Ken Kesey, so I’d try. By the end of the night Kesey had invited them all down to La Honda, his woodsy retreat outside of San Francisco. It was a time of extreme turbulence—riots in Berkeley. He was always under assault by the police—day in and day out, so La Honda was like a war zone. But he had a lot of the literary, intellectual crowd down there, Stanford people also, visiting editors, and Hell’s Angels. Kesey’s place was a real cultural vortex.

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“We’re Never Alone”

“I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situatio

The Art of Fiction No. 86

This interview with John Barth was conducted in the studios of KUHT in Houston, Texas, for a series entitled  The Writer in Society . The stage set was made up to resemble a writer’s den—the decor including a small globe of the world, bronze Remington-like animal statuary, a stand-up bookshelf with glass shelves on which were placed some potted plants and a haphazard collection of books, a few volumes of the Reader’s Digest condensed novel series among them. Large pots of plants were set about. Barth sat amongst them in a cane chair. He is a tall man with a domed forehead; a pair of very large-rimmed spectacles give him a professorial, owlish look. He is a caricaturist’s delight. He sports a very wide and straight mustache. Recently he had grown a beard. In manner, Barth has been described as a combination of British officer and Southern gentleman.

“We’ll have to stick to the channel,” he wrote in his first novel,  The Floating Opera , “and let the creeks and coves go by.” Every novel since then has been a refutation of this dictum of sticking to the main topic. He is especially influenced by the classical cyclical tales such as Burton’s  Thousand and One Nights  and the  Gesta Romanorum , and by the complexities of such modern masters as Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett. For novels distinguished by a wide range of erudition, invention, wit, historical references, whimsy, bawdiness, and a great richness of image and style, Barth has been described as an “ecologist of information.”

Of his working habits Barth has said that he rises at six in the morning and puts an electric percolator in the kitchen so that during the course of sitting for six hours at his desk he has an excuse for the exercise of walking back and forth from his study to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He speaks of measuring his work not by the day (as Hemingway did) but by the month and the year. “That way you don’t feel so terrible if you put in three days straight without turning up much of anything. You don’t feel blocked.”

This interview, being restricted to a half-hour’s conversation for a television audience, was thought to be a bit short by the usual standards of the magazine. It was assumed that Barth, being such a master of the prolix, would surely make some additions. Extra questions were sent him. The interview was returned to these offices with the questions unanswered, and the text of the interview edited and shortened. Perhaps Barth had not noticed the additional questions. This interview was sent back, this time with a small emolument attached for taking the trouble. The interview was returned once again, along with the uncashed check, with the following statement: “It doesn’t displease me to hear that our interview will be perhaps the shortest one you’ve run. In fact, it’s a bit shorter now than it was before (enclosed). Better not run it by me again!”

When were the first stirrings? When did you actually understand that writing was going to be your profession? Was there a moment?

It seems to happen later in the lives of American writers than Europeans. American boys and girls don’t grow up thinking, “I’m going to be a writer,” the way we’re told Flaubert did; at about age twelve he decided he would be a great French writer and, by George, he turned out to  be  one. Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of  passionate default . In my case, I was going to be a musician. Then I found out that while I had an amateur’s flair, I did not have preprofessional talent. So I went on to Johns Hopkins University to find something else to do. There I found myself writing stories—making all the mistakes that new writers usually make. After I had written about a novel’s worth of bad pages, I understood that while I was not doing it well,  that  was the thing I was going to do. I don’t remember that realization coming as a swoop of insight, or as an exhilarating experience, but as a kind of absolute recognition that for well or for ill, that was the way I was going to spend my life. I had the advantage at Johns Hopkins of a splendid old Spanish poet-teacher, with whom I read  Don Quixote . I can’t remember a thing he said about  Don Quixote , but old Pedro Salinas, now dead, a refugee from Franco’s Spain, embodied to my innocent, ingenuous eyes, the possibility that a life devoted to the making of sentences and the telling of stories can be dignified and noble. Whether the works have turned out to be dignified and noble is another question, but I think that my experience is not uncommon: You decide to be a violinist, you decide to be a sculptor or a painter, but you find yourself being a novelist.

What was the musical instrument you started out with?

I played drums. What I hoped to be eventually was an orchestrator—what in those days was called an arranger. An arranger is a chap who takes someone else’s melody and turns it to his purpose. For better or worse, my career as a novelist has been that of an arranger. My imagination is most at ease with an old literary convention like the epistolary novel, or a classical myth—received melody lines, so to speak, which I then reorchestrate to my purpose.

What’s first when you sit down to begin a novel? Is it the form, as in the epistolary novel, or character, or plot? 

Different books start in different ways. I sometimes wish that I were the kind of writer who begins with a passionate interest in a character and then, as I’ve heard other writers say, just gives that character elbowroom and sees what he or she wants to do. I’m not that kind of writer. Much more often I start with a shape or form, maybe an image. The floating showboat, for example, which became the central image in  The Floating Opera , was a photograph of an actual showboat I remember seeing as a child. It happened to be named  Captain Adams’ Original Unparalleled Floating Opera , and when nature, in her heavy-handed way, gives you an image like that, the only honorable thing to do is to make a novel out of it. This may not be the most elevated of approaches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, comes to the medium of fiction with a high moral purpose; he wants, literally, to try to change the world through the medium of the novel. I honor and admire that intention, but just as often a great writer will come to his novel with a much less elevated purpose than wanting to undermine the Soviet government. Henry James wanted to write a book in the shape of an hourglass. Flaubert wanted to write a novel about  nothing . What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose—they will sing or not regardless. 

What was in your way that you had to get out of your way?

What was in my way? Chekhov makes a remark to his brother, the brother he was always hectoring in letters, “What the aristocrats take for granted, we pay for with our youth.” I had to pay my tuition in literature that way. I came from a fairly unsophisticated family from the rural, southern Eastern Shore of Maryland—which is very “deep South” in its ethos. I went to a mediocre public high school (which I enjoyed), fell into a good university on a scholarship, and then had to learn, from scratch, that civilization existed, that literature had been going on. That kind of innocence is the reverse of the exquisite sophistication with which a writer like Vladimir Nabokov comes to the medium—knowing it already, as if he’s been in on the conversation since it began. Yet the innocence that writers like myself have to overcome, if it doesn’t ruin us altogether, can become a sort of strength. You’re not intimidated by your distinguished predecessors, the great literary dead. You have a chutzpah in your approach to the medium that may carry you through those apprentice days when nobody’s telling you you’re any good because you aren’t yet. Everything is a discovery. I read Mark Twain’s  Huckleberry Finn  when I was about twenty-five. If I had read it when I was nineteen, I might have been intimidated; the same with Dickens and other great novelists. In my position I remained armed with a kind of “invincible innocence”—I think that’s what the Catholics call it—that with the best of fortune can survive even later experience and sophistication and carry you right to the end of the story.

From the Archive, Issue 95

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Read 9 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)

in Literature , Writing | December 27th, 2013 4 Comments

Image  via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Most read­ers know Hunter S. Thomp­son for his 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Sav­age Jour­ney to the Heart of the Amer­i­can Dream . But in over 45 years of writ­ing, this pro­lif­ic observ­er of the Amer­i­can scene wrote volu­mi­nous­ly, often hilar­i­ous­ly, and usu­al­ly with decep­tive­ly clear-eyed vit­ri­ol on sports, pol­i­tics, media, and oth­er vicious­ly addic­tive pur­suits. (“I hate to advo­cate drugs, alco­hol, vio­lence, or insan­i­ty to any­one,” he famous­ly said, “but they’ve always worked for me.”) His dis­tinc­tive style, often imi­tat­ed but nev­er repli­cat­ed, all but forced the coin­ing of the term “gonzo” jour­nal­ism. But what could define it? One clue comes in  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas itself, when Thomp­son reflects on his expe­ri­ence in the city, osten­si­bly as a reporter: “What  was  the sto­ry? Nobody had both­ered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enter­prise. The Amer­i­can Dream. Hor­a­tio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it  now : pure Gonzo jour­nal­ism.”

You’ll find out more in the  Paris Review ’s inter­view with Thomp­son , in which he recounts once feel­ing that “jour­nal­ism was just a tick­et to ride out, that I was basi­cal­ly meant for high­er things. Nov­els.” Sit­ting down to begin his prop­er lit­er­ary career, Thomp­son took a quick job writ­ing up the Hel­l’s Angels , which let him get over “the idea that jour­nal­ism was a low­er call­ing. Jour­nal­ism is fun because it offers imme­di­ate work. You get hired and at least you can cov­er the f&cking City Hall. It’s excit­ing.” And then came the real epiphany, after he went to cov­er the Ken­tucky Der­by for  Scan­lan ’s: “Most depress­ing days of my life. I’d lie in my tub at the Roy­al­ton. I thought I had failed com­plete­ly as a jour­nal­ist. Final­ly, in des­per­a­tion and embar­rass­ment, I began to rip the pages out of my note­book and give them to a copy­boy to take to a fax machine down the street. When I left I was a bro­ken man, failed total­ly, and con­vinced I’d be exposed when the stuff came out.”

Indeed, the expo­sure came, but not in the way he expect­ed. Below, we’ve col­lect­ed ten of Thomp­son’s arti­cles freely avail­able online, from those ear­ly pieces on the Hel­l’s Angels and the Ken­tucky Der­by to oth­ers on the 1972 Pres­i­den­tial race, the Hon­olu­lu Marathon, Richard Nixon, and wee-hour con­ver­sa­tions with Bill Mur­ray. But don’t take these sub­jects too lit­er­al­ly; Thomp­son always had a way of find­ing some­thing even more inter­est­ing in exact­ly the oppo­site direc­tion from what­ev­er he’d ini­tial­ly meant to write about. And that, per­haps, reveals more about the gonzo method than any­thing else.

“ The Motor­cy­cle Gangs: Losers and Out­siders ” ( The Nation , 1965) The arti­cle that would become the basis for Thomp­son’s first book,  Hel­l’s Angels: The Strange and Ter­ri­ble Saga of the Out­law Motor­cy­cle Gangs . “When you get in an argu­ment with a group of out­law motor­cy­clists, you can gen­er­al­ly count your chances of emerg­ing unmaimed by the num­ber of heavy-hand­ed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bot­tle. In this league, sports­man­ship is for old lib­er­als and young fools.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Rolling Stone, 1971) The Gonzo jour­nal­ism clas­sic first appeared as a two-part series in  Rolling Stone  mag­a­zine in Novem­ber 1971, com­plete with  illus­tra­tions from Ralph Stead­man , before being pub­lished as a book in 1972.   Rolling Stone  has  post­ed the orig­i­nal ver­sion on its web site .

“ Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail in ’72 ″ ( Rolling Stone , 1973) Excerpts from Thomp­son’s book of near­ly the same name, an exam­i­na­tion of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty can­di­date George McGov­ern’s unsuc­cess­ful bid for the Pres­i­den­cy that McGov­ern’s cam­paign man­ag­er Frank Mankiewicz called “the least fac­tu­al, most accu­rate account” in print. “My own the­o­ry, which sounds like mad­ness, is that McGov­ern would have been bet­ter off run­ning against Nixon with the same kind of neo-‘radical’ cam­paign he ran in the pri­maries. Not rad­i­cal in the left/right sense, but rad­i­cal in a sense that he was com­ing on with a new… a dif­fer­ent type of politi­cian… a per­son who actu­al­ly would grab the sys­tem by the ears and shake it.”

“ The Curse of Lono ” ( Play­boy , 1983) Thomp­son and Stead­man’s assign­ment from  Run­ning  mag­a­zine to cov­er the Hon­ololu marathon turns into a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly “ter­ri­ble mis­ad­ven­ture,” this one even involv­ing the old Hawai­ian gods. “It was not easy for me, either, to accept the fact that I was born 1700 years ago in an ocean-going canoe some­where off the Kona Coast of Hawaii, a prince of roy­al Poly­ne­sian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono, ruler of all the islands, god of excess, unde­feat­ed box­er. How’s that for roots?”

“ He Was a Crook ” ( Rolling Stone , 1994) Thomp­son’s obit­u­ary of, and per­son­al his­to­ry of his hatred for, Pres­i­dent Richard M. Nixon. “Some peo­ple will say that words like  scum  and  rot­ten  are wrong for Objec­tive Jour­nal­ism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objec­tive rules and dog­ma that allowed Nixon to slith­er into the White House in the first place.

“ Doomed Love at the Taco Stand ” ( Time , 2001) Thomp­son’s adven­tures in Cal­i­for­nia, to which he has returned for the pro­duc­tion of Ter­ry Gilliam’s film adap­ta­tion of  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  star­ring John­ny Depp. “I had to set­tle for half of Dep­p’s trail­er, along with his C4 Porsche and his wig, so I could look more like myself when I drove around Bev­er­ly Hills and stared at peo­ple when we rolled to a halt at stop­lights on Rodeo Dri­ve.”

“ Fear & Loathing in Amer­i­ca ” (ESPN.com, 2001) In the imme­di­ate after­math of 9/11, Thomp­son looks out onto the grim and para­noid future he sees ahead. “This is going to be a very expen­sive war, and Vic­to­ry is not guar­an­teed — for any­one, and cer­tain­ly not for any­one as baf­fled as George W. Bush.”

“Pris­on­er of Den­ver” (Van­i­ty Fair, 2004) A chron­i­cle of Thomp­son’s (posthu­mous­ly suc­cess­ful) involve­ment in the case of Lisl Auman, a young woman he believed wrong­ful­ly impris­oned for the mur­der of a police offi­cer. “ ‘We’ is the most pow­er­ful word in pol­i­tics. Today it’s Lisl Auman, but tomor­row it could be you, me, us.”

“ Shot­gun Golf with Bill Mur­ray ” (ESPN.com, 2005) Thomp­son’s final piece of writ­ing, in which he runs an idea for a new sport —com­bin­ing golf, Japan­ese mul­ti­sto­ry dri­ving ranges, and the dis­charg­ing of shot­guns — by the com­e­dy leg­end at 3:30 in the morn­ing. “It was Bill Mur­ray who taught me how to mor­ti­fy your oppo­nents in any sport­ing con­test, hon­est or oth­er­wise. He taught me my humil­i­at­ing PGA fade­away shot, which has earned me a lot of mon­ey… after that, I taught him how to swim, and then I intro­duced him to the shoot­ing arts, and now he wins every­thing he touch­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son Calls Tech Sup­port, Unleash­es a Tirade Full of Fear and Loathing (NSFW)

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son (NSFW)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Remem­bers Jim­my Carter’s Cap­ti­vat­ing Bob Dylan Speech (1974)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces  Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture  and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les,  A Los Ange­les Primer . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at  @colinmarshall  or on his  brand new Face­book page .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (4) |

Related posts:

Comments (4), 4 comments so far.

I am look­ing for free inter­petur ebooks ASL sign lan­guage I am a begin­ner do you have any that I can use actu­al­ly Books that I can have pub­lish­er’s name is Mick­ey Flodin

Most of these links are bust­ed — might be time for an update?

want to send you mon­ey but your web­site makes this dif­fi­cult.

thomp­son is good writer

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Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) was an iconic American journalist and author, renowned for his unique writing style and irreverent approach to journalism. He is best known for his book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which chronicled his drug-fueled adventures in the 1960s. Thompson's writing often touched on themes of political corruption, counterculture, and the decline of the American Dream.

Thompson's career spanned several decades and included work for publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. His work was characterized by his unapologetic voice and fearless approach to journalism, which often involved him immersing himself in the story he was covering.

In addition to his journalism, Thompson was also a prolific author, with several books and collections of essays to his name. He was a cultural icon of his time, known for his wild personality and unconventional lifestyle. Thompson's impact on journalism and literature is still felt today, with his writing continuing to inspire a new generation of writers and journalists.

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Hunter S. Thompson's Prediction Of The World Post-9/11 Was Spot On

He wrote it in a column on 12/09/01.

Mark McGowan

Sixteen years ago today the world witnessed the most horrific terrorist attack in history, when two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City.

Most of us who are old enough to remember that chilling day in 2001 will most probably recall exactly where we were and what we were doing when the news broke. At first there was confusion after the first plane hit, but then it became clear what was happening as cameras captured the second crashing into the World Trade Center.

Many became heroes that day, and in the weeks that followed, though there were many more fatalities. It was impossible to prepare for, and even harder to react to. It changed a lot of things.

People tried to predict what would happen from that day onwards, and writer Hunter S. Thompson came eerily close to getting it exactly right.

On 12 September 2001, a day after the attack, Thompson's ESPN column read: "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

"It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

"We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

"This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed - for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now.

"He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force."

Accurate or merely speculative? People are certainly suggesting that Thompson, the founder of gonzo journalism and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , got closer than anyone else to foreseeing how things would go after this.

Sources: Uproxx , ESPN

Topics:  9/11 , terror , terror attack , Terrorist

Mark is a journalist at LADbible, who joined in 2015 after a year as a freelance writer. In the past he blogged for independent football fan channel Redmen TV, after graduating from Staffordshire University with degrees in journalism and English literature. He has worked on campaigns such as UOKM8? and IIOC.

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The amount of foresight you have to have to predict that just one day after is chilling.