William McKeen
Professor and chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University.
He wrote his mother that he had begun to hate the sight of his typewriter.
To the generation of young political reporters, Hunter was Mount Rushmore, a living god on earth.
The Dream obsessed him ... but what was it? Was it Horatio Alger, rags to riches, the idea that you could start with nothing and end up rolling naked in stacks of hundreds? Or was it a dream of freedom? Personal freedom...or the concept of freedom that the founders brought into the whole world?
Barger thought Hunter provoked Junkie George so that the beating could be used as a gimmick to promote the book.
He taught himself to write, retyping books by writers he admired: Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner... the usual heavyweights. He said he wanted to get inside the rhythm of their language and find his own stlye.
This writing wasn't painful. It was like being high.
Hunter couldn't stop working. McCumber remembered Hunter working nine days without sleep.
The latest firing had put him at a crossroads: he could continue with the fantasy of being a writer, or he could actually make the commitment.
His legions of stoned admirers probably really thought he took a hundred hits of acid before sitting down to write. But the craftsmanship those close to him saw as he agonized over his words spoke to how much went into making it look like a breeze.
Nothing infuriates an academic more than a talented and successful colleague.
But he discovered his success later, when he began to write just like he talked.
Putting Hunter in context was tough.
In these letters to Ridley, Hunters Gonzo style began to rear its head. One of the characteristics of the style Hunter developed was his preoccupation of getting the story. In fact, getting the story became the story. His writing could be classified as metajournalism, journalism about the process of journalism.
Hunter Thompson wrote suicide notes all his life.
Perhaps the heart of the American Dream was found in the search.
Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast.
The lifestyle of the character he had created had consumed him.
He kept growing. He thought it was very important to keep growing all your life.
And whether he wanted to be or not, he was famous.
For a man complaining about the agony of celebrity, he wasn't doing anything to stop perpetuating his image as America's premier outlaw journalist.