Hunters gone! Good for Him. Smart Man He Is (or was).

Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, Is Dead at 67
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN Published: February 22, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, the anger-driven, drug-fueled writer for Rolling Stone magazine whose obscenity-laced prose broke down the wall between reader and writer, writer and subject, shot and killed himself on Sunday at his home in Woody Creek, Colo. He was 67.
His death was reported by the Pitkin County sheriff's office.


At his peak Mr. Thomson reached out in his writing to a generation made cynical by the Vietnam War and the Watergate political scandal and that was prepared to respond to Mr. Thompson's visceral honesty, his creative blend of fact and fantasy, his rage at convention and power.
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," published by Random House in 1972, cemented Mr. Thompson's place as a singular presence in American journalism or, as he once called himself, "a connoisseur of edge work." In that semi-fictional work, Mr. Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, ride from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a convertible loaded up with drugs, in what the book's subtitle describes as "a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream."
But it was his writing as a national political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine that brought Mr. Thompson's rule-breaking style to a broader audience, where his outrageous voice helped refocus the nation's customarily straitlaced political dialogue.
It was while covering the primary race and the presidential campaign between George McGovern and the incumbent Richard M. Nixon in 1972 that Mr. Thompson forced mainstream news organizations to take notice. That year, some of his most acerbic lines were quoted in publications like Newsweek and The New York Times. (A Times writer quoted Mr. Thompson saying Hubert Humphrey was campaigning like "a rat in heat.")
For Mr. Thompson the goal was to tell the truth - at least his version of the truth - and it did not much matter how he got there. "Fiction," Mr. Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, "is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist. You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
In more recent years Mr. Thompson seemed a man cornered by his own self-image, marginalized for having stayed put while the generation he once courted - the generation that brandished the slogan "drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll" - turned its attention to issues like property taxes and social security. Mr. Thompson found that the image he built during his adult life, that of the heavy-drinking, drug-using, gun- toting, sharp-tongued social critic with aviator glasses and a cigarette between his lips, had become a cartoon character - literally. Uncle Duke, a character in "Doonesbury," the Garry Trudeau comic strip, was modeled after Mr. Thompson, and the real Mr. Thompson wasn't too thrilled.
"You don't really think of making it in America as being a cartoon character," Mr. Thompson said in an interview with The Associated Press in the early 1980's. "It's hard to try and run around and be normal when you're confronted constantly with movies and comic strips."
Yet his early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson's approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions.
Hunter Stockton Thompson was born on July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Ky. He was educated in public schools and joined the United States Air Force after high school. There he was introduced to journalism, covering sports for an Air Force newspaper in Florida. He was honorably discharged in 1958 and then worked a series of jobs writing for small-town newspapers. Even before he burst onto the national scene, Mr. Thompson had built a reputation as an eccentric, hard-driving reporter in upstate New York.