Hunter S. Thompson Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Early Life
Hunter Stockton Thompson was born on July 18, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky. He grew up in a middle-class family and showed an early appetite for literature, reading authors who combined humor, social observation, and a rebellious sense of justice. His father died while he was in his teens, and the loss, combined with the frustrations of a conservative social milieu, propelled him toward restless, defiant pursuits. He ran into minor trouble with the law as a teenager and developed a fascination with American mythology: sports heroes, outlaw figures, and the rough edges of democracy that would later animate his journalism.

Early Career in Journalism
Thompson enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in the mid-1950s and was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where he wrote for the base newspaper. He learned fast that he was better suited to the independence of a reporter than to military discipline. After leaving the service he took a series of newsroom jobs and freelancing assignments, including a stint as a copy boy at Time magazine and reporting jobs at small newspapers. He spent time in Puerto Rico in the early 1960s, filing pieces for local outlets and working on a novel set there. Those years honed his voice: impatient with canned language, eager to put himself on the line, and determined to make the story as vivid as a night in the streets he walked.

Breakthrough with Hell's Angels
Thompson's early national attention came with Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966). He embedded himself among the riders in California, studied their rituals, and confronted their violence, culminating in a beating that ended his time with the club. The book's mix of immersion, social analysis, and a narrator who refused to hide his subjectivity made it a landmark. Sonny Barger and other Angels became emblematic figures in his portrait of postwar American alienation and bravado.

The Birth of Gonzo Journalism
In 1970 he published The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved in Scanlan's Monthly, with illustrations by the British artist Ralph Steadman. That collaboration crystallized what came to be called Gonzo journalism: a first-person method that made the writer's perceptions, anxieties, and contradictions central to the story. The piece reads like a hallucinatory mirror held up to American spectacle, and it signaled that Thompson would rely on voice, timing, and fearless confession as much as on conventional reportage. He began contributing frequently to Rolling Stone, where editor and publisher Jann Wenner provided space for his long-form experiments.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas emerged from reporting trips in 1971 and appeared first as a Rolling Stone serial, then as a book in 1972. Traveling with his friend and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, he turned a journey to cover a desert motor race and a narcotics conference into a savage, comic odyssey through the American Dream. In its pages, the line between fact and invention is deliberately blurred to reveal deeper truths about authority, consumption, and the end of the 1960s. Steadman's ink-splattered illustrations became inseparable from Thompson's voice, and the book secured his status as a defining American writer of his era.

Politics and the Campaign Trail
Thompson's engagement with national politics culminated in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, a sustained chronicle of the presidential race that followed George McGovern's insurgent campaign and Richard Nixon's ruthless re-election. He captured the mechanics of American politics with irreverent skepticism, noting both the idealism of volunteers and the compromises of power. He had a long-standing contempt for Nixon, whom he considered the personification of official deceit. He also recognized charisma and tactical skill where he saw it, and his portraits of staffers, strategists, and reporters on the bus have influenced campaign writing ever since.

Freak Power and Life in Colorado
By the late 1960s Thompson had settled at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado. He pursued a life that combined high-velocity writing with local activism, firearms and football, and the rhythms of mountain-town politics. In 1970 he ran for sheriff of Pitkin County on a reformist, anti-development slate known as Freak Power. He advocated environmental protection, civil liberties, and the decriminalization of drug use for adults. He lost narrowly, but the campaign left a lasting imprint on local politics and later echoed in his profile pieces and essays. He maintained friendships with local lawmen, including future sheriff Bob Braudis, while keeping a satirist's eye trained on wealth and growth in the Rockies.

Later Work and Collaborations
Thompson's output after the early 1970s blended books, magazine features, and letters. Collections such as The Great Shark Hunt (1979) gathered earlier reporting and essays. He collaborated again with Steadman on The Curse of Lono (1983), and he returned to political commentary with Generation of Swine (1988) and Songs of the Doomed (1990). His long-gestating early novel The Rum Diary, set in Puerto Rico, finally appeared in 1998. He published Kingdom of Fear in 2003, a memoiristic mosaic of courtroom battles, pranks, and reflections on authority. He also wrote a bracing series of sports and politics columns for ESPN's Page 2 in the early 2000s, later collected as Hey Rube. Along the way, he sustained friendships with journalists and artists who valued his independence, including Tom Wolfe, and his persona attracted actors and musicians; Bill Murray and Johnny Depp each portrayed versions of him on screen, with Depp becoming a close friend.

Personal Life
Thompson married Sandra Dawn Conklin in 1963; they had one son, Juan, and later divorced. In 2003 he married Anita Thompson, who worked closely with him in his final years and later curated his archives. Life at Owl Farm mixed domestic routines with late-night writing sessions, phone calls to editors, target practice, and gatherings of friends. He had a formidable appetite for risk and a meticulous ear for language, pounding out drafts that blended comic timing with moral outrage. Even amid the showmanship, he revered craft: deadlines, cadence, and the precise weight of a sentence.

Public Persona and Conflicts
Thompson could be both generous and combative. He relished tough editors and collaborators who could match his intensity. He feuded with institutions he considered hypocritical and skewered public figures mercilessly, yet he was also capable of tender portraits, especially of those who paid a price for telling the truth. He once shared a car ride with Nixon in which they spoke only about football, a story he retold to illustrate the odd rituals of access journalism. His friendships with Steadman and Wenner anchored decades of work, while his bond with Oscar Zeta Acosta added a tragic note; Acosta disappeared in the mid-1970s, and Thompson kept returning to that absence in interviews and recollections.

Death and Legacy
Hunter S. Thompson died by suicide on February 20, 2005, at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado. He had been dealing with health problems and chronic pain. Friends, family, and collaborators gathered later that year for a memorial in which his ashes were fired from a cannon, a spectacle organized with the help of Johnny Depp and marked by Ralph Steadman's unmistakable Gonzo emblem. His legacy endures in the vocabulary of modern journalism: immersion reporting that admits the reporter's biases, a novelist's sense of scene, and an unblinking insistence that tone can be a form of truth. Writers of politics, sports, and culture continue to cite him as an influence, and his best work remains an argument for courage on the page. He captured the roar and the hangover of postwar America, and he did so in a voice that made readers feel the rush of headlights on a desert highway and the cold clarity of dawn after the chase.

Our collection contains 26 quotes who is written by Hunter, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

Other people realated to Hunter: P. J. O'Rourke (Journalist), Joan Didion (Author), Johnny Depp (Actor), Alex Cox (Director), Jim Mitchell (Director), G. B. Trudeau (Cartoonist), Terry Gilliam (Director)

• 1998 The Rum Diary (Novel)
• 1988 Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (Book)
• 1983 The Curse of Lono (Book)
• 1973 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (Book)
• 1972 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Novel)
• 1966 Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Book)