Acerbic counterculture writer Hunter S. Thompson,died last night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Colorado home at the age of 67.
"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect
You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it
Hunter S Thompsonthat privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the
Aspen Daily News.
Juan Thompson found his father's body. Thompson's wife was not home at the time.
He popularised a new form of fictional journalism in his 1972 classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.Thompson also wrote Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.
Thompson is credited with pioneering New Journalism - or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" - in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story. Much of his earliest work appeared in Rolling Stonemagazine.
"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist," Thompson said in 2003. "You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson also wrote such collections as Generation of Swineand Songs of the Doomed. His first-ever novel, The Rum Diary, written in 1959, was first published in 1998.
Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era, and Richard Nixon once said he represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character".
Thompson also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury" and was portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Hunter S. Thompson in his Rocky Mountain cabin in 1992
Other books include The Great Shark Hunt, Hell's Angelsand The Proud Highway. His most recent effort was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.
"He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years," Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson's former editors, said.
"It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible," quipped Krassner.
"But every editor that I know, myself included, was willing to accept a certain prima donna journalism in the demands he would make to cover a particular story," he said. "They were willing to risk all of his irresponsible behavior in order to share his talent with their readers."
The writer's compound in Woody Creek, not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons; in 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant, Deborah Fuller, trying to chase a bear off his property.