Bequeathing us the form of journalism he developed during the 60s and 70s known as gonzo (which entails a cocktail of fact and fiction with elements of the real or imaginary consumption of drugs and/or alcohol), Hunter S Thompson took his life on Sunday evening at his home in Colorado with a gunshot to the head. Since then the tributes have been flowing for this colourful, hard living exponent of his own creation - the original gonzo hack. He summed up his own philosophy succinctly: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone but they always worked for me." A true maverick, he once rode with the Hell's Angels then had a spectacular falling out with them (which spawned his first major book 'Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga', in 1967), and kept a peacock as a guard-dog.
His style was brought to a modern audience by Terry Gilliam's 1998 film of his best known work 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', starring Johnny Depp as himself. Beneath the drug and alcohol haze, he was a sane and astute moral commentator who never minced his words where politicians were concerned - he was known to be opposed to the re-election of George (W) Bush, describing a consecutive term in typical fashion as, "four more years of syphilis." An inspiration to writers worldwide desperate to follow in his free-wheeling path, Hunter S Thompson leaves them to mourn the passing of their gonzo Godfather. Some of the more anarchic moments in his raucous life can only be imagined from his observation that, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
However, a more fitting epitaph for this literary champion of counter-culture is his assertion:
zzzzzzzz"Some may never live, but the crazy never die."
R.I.P Hunter Stockton Thompson 18/07/1937 - 20/02/2005
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