Many books have been written about late, great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, including his own semi-biographical works of personal correspondence such as “The Proud Highway” and “Fear and Loathing in America.” But even if you’ve read them all, “Outlaw Journalist” goes to another level to provide the definitive biography of a man widely considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century as well as one of the most influential characters in modern pop culture.
It’s hard to imagine higher praise than acclaimed investigative reporter Greg Palast declaring the book “the Great Red Shark of Hunter biographies,” as he does on the back cover. “McKeen gives us full frontal HST, horrific and heroic, the class clown of the class war. Read it or die,” recommends Palast (the journalist who broke the story on how the 2000 election was stolen in Florida in his book “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.”)
McKeen, Chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida, struck up a friendship with Thompson in the early ‘90s and was able to parlay that relationship into access for interviews with a pantheon of Thompson’s closest allies. McKeen traces the entire tale from Thompson’s childhood on the wrong side of the tracks in Louisville, Ky., to his struggles as a young writer and his breakthrough covering the Hell’s Angels, to his run for sheriff of Aspen on a “freak power” ticket to his rise to a fame that imprisoned him in a caricature of himself, to his stunning yet predictable shotgun suicide in 2005 after his body had broken down and betrayed him.
It’s not hard to see how Thompson became a serious alcoholic when McKeen reveals that Hunter was nipping sips from his dad’s whiskey glass as a young child. McKeen doesn’t shy away from revealing the manic madman that informed Thompson’s Raul Duke persona from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” or the flawed Jekyll & Hyde personality that ultimately led to divorce from wife Sandy in 1978. But the book also digs deep to show what an idealistic patriot Thompson was, devoted to justice and liberty for all, and how this informed his writing as much as anything.
McKeen traces how this latter side evolved as Thompson experienced San Francisco’s socio-cultural revolution in the mid-‘60s and was radicalized in the violent crucible of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago. It all led to the pursuit of “the American Dream” in the classic that Thompson came to refer to as “the Vegas book” and the brilliant “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” one of the most influential works in the history of political journalism. A critical factor was how both books began as a series of articles in Rolling Stone magazine, thanks to publisher Jann Wenner.
“Hunter Thompson learned to approximate the effect of mind-blasting drugs in his prose style,” wrote literary critic Morris Dickstein. “In 1972 he affronted the taboos of political writing, and recorded the nuts and bolts of a presidential campaign with all the contempt and incredulity that other reporters must feel but censor out. The result was the kind of straightforward, uninhibited intelligence that showed up the timidities and clichés that dominated the field.”
Thompson’s writing career arguably peaked at that point, but the rest of his life remains an intriguing cautionary tale of how too much fame and too much substance use can burn out even the brightest talent.
Serious Hunter fans will really dig the way that McKeen explores the genesis and evolution of Thompson’s unique writing style as no biographer has before. McKeen traces how Thompson’s gonzo style began to percolate while he was reporting from Latin America in the early ‘60s.
“One of the characteristics of the style Hunter developed was his preoccupation with getting the story. In fact, getting the story became the story. His writing could be classified as metajournalism, journalism about the process of journalism,” writes McKeen.
In 1965, a 28-year-old destitute Thompson approached editor Carey McWilliams of The Nation for an assignment and it was McWilliams who suggested he look into the outlaw motorcycle gang known as the Hell’s Angels. Living in San Francisco at the time enabled Thompson to befriend the Angels for an article that appeared in the magazine that May. One of Thompson’s quotes from a discussion with one of the Angels goes a long way toward explaining the sensibility that informed Thompson’s rebellious and savvy attitude toward the mainstream press.
“We were talking across a pool table about the rash of publicity and how it had affected the Angel’s activities. I was trying to explain to him that the bulk of the press in this country has such a vested interested in the status quo that it can’t afford to do much honest probing at the roots, for fear of what they might find,” said/wrote Thompson. The article about the Hell’s Angels caused such a sensation that Thompson had seven book offers within a week of its publication.
With the Hell’s Angels book deadline approaching, Hunter panicked and another aspect of his legendary writing prowess was born. “He thought if he didn’t make deadline, he would have to pay back the advance to Random House. So he said goodbye to Sandy and [son]Juan and drove down Highway 101 until he found a small motel near Monterey. He moved in with his IBM Selectric, his uppers, and his Wild Turkey, and wrote the second half of the book in four days, fueled by radio rock ‘n’ roll and McDonald’s hamburgers. He wrote for one hundred straight hours without sleep and made his March 1 deadline,” writes McKeen.
A critical and financial hit, the book’s success brought the assignment to write about “the American Dream,” which ultimately led to the classic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” A critical evolution of the gonzo style along the way was a magazine article entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, where Hunter first teamed with artist Ralph Steadman. Hunter panicked again at deadline and finished the article by including scrawled pages ripped straight from his journal. To his amazement, Scanlan’s magazine printed the article word for word and it was hailed as a breakthrough in journalism.
“I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times? It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids,” Thompson said of the pivotal moment. The “Vegas book” wound up being an elegy for the lost dream of the ‘60s counterculture. McKeen cites the New York Times Book Review’s Crawford Woods: “Neither novel nor nonfiction… Its roots are in the particular sense of the 1960s that a new voice was demanded… How to tell the story of a time when all fiction was science fiction, all facts lies? The New Journalism was born.”
McKeen also reports on Thompson’s inspirational methods, such as blasting The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! for writing “fuel.” But what comes out above all is how deeply Thompson cared about the perilous direction of society under the Nixon regime, the constant research he did as a voracious consumer of media, his ever-keen skills of observation regardless of inebriation, and how he was utterly devoted to uncovering the myth of so-called objective journalism.
The “Vegas book” made Thompson a star who then went on to cover the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone. But it came with a price. “He was dealing with the Heavies,” Sandy said. “He was playing with the Players. And he was even winning. But it was taking its toll.”
Gary Hart, then a political operative for Senator and Democratic nominee George McGovern, is quoted on how the other reporters on the campaign trail became enamored with Thompson after the success of Vegas. “Hunter was beginning to be a cult figure… Other journalists followed him around like puppy dogs. It was like he had some magic that they wanted to capture.”
McKeen also quotes legendary Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who was uncovering the Watergate scandal while Thompson was following the candidates, on the phenomenon that arose around Hunter’s campaign reporting. “It’s the moment we realized that traditional journalism is not sufficient,” said Bernstein. Later, Bernstein would note that “We think of him as a libertine outlaw, but he’s actually a moralist.”
McKeen traces the beginning of Thompson’s decline to the cocaine habit he started to develop in 1973. Journalist and historian Douglas Brinkley says Thompson went from 20 flawless pages a day to 20 flawless pages a month. Wife Sandy’s drinking spiraled as well, with the couple being weighed down by numerous miscarriages that she suffered, not to mention Thompson’s philandering ways. McKeen writes that Thompson “began drinking more and began using drugs to dull pain, not to feed his imagination.”
While crossing this line clearly diminished Thompson’s output, he was known as someone who detested sloppy drunks and those who felt the need to approach him in such a way. “You don’t live into your sixties doing as much heavy drug and alcohol lifestyle as Hunter’s had and still be around if you don’t know there’s a limit somewhere,” Brinkley said. “Hunter doesn’t go over the cliff. He races a hundred miles an hour to the cliff, slams on the brakes and stops with the wheels dangling over, but he doesn’t go off.”
While his output declined over the years, his influence only continued to grow, as successive generations were turned on to his writing and then through the 1998 cult-classic film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” starring Johnny Depp. But McKeen makes it clear that while Hunter lived a high life many would envy, he also became “a prisoner of his persona.”
“He was trapped by a mythology he created,” actor John Cusack is quoted as saying. “I think he would admit that.”
In the end, “Outlaw Journalist” paints a picture of a flawed persona but a unique and immense talent who played a hugely influential role on American society. At Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s public wake in Golden Gate Park, his daughter Annabelle declared that he was not just a great musician, but “a great American.” The same comparison can be made for Hunter S. Thompson – he was more than just a great writer, he was a great American who had a tremendous influence on American culture.
“What’s it all about, really, is what you can get away with. If you’re a writer, that means writing about what you want to write about,” Thompson is quoted as saying in the last year of his life when pressed for a definition of his style. It’s as good a definition as any, though there’s few with the tenacity and vision that Thompson had to pull it off.
5/5 Stars
Author: William McKeen
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Reviewed by Greg M. Schwartz
