“I would nominate [Hunter Thompson] as the century’s greatest comic writer in the English language.”
- Tom Wolfe

Hunter’s life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman’s term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from “The Hell’s Angels” in a 1973 anthology called “The New Journalism,” he said he wasn’t part of anybody’s group. He wrote “gonzo.” He was sui generis. And that he was.

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson’s own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century’s greatest comic writer in the English language.

- Tom Wolfe @ OpinionJournal, 22 Feb. 2005: link.

In a new play based on Hunter S. Thompson, “performer and writer ‘B. Duke’ incarnates the Last Free American Writer as he was during the intense and difficult years 1968-1971.”

From an interview with B. Duke, conducted by R.U. Sirius:

I suggested that we use Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. That’s a collection of Thompson’s letters from ‘68 - ‘76. I had read that a few years earlier and I’d become keenly aware that the nuances of a real man were there.

… He was ferocious. He would start in on speed, probably somewhere around 11 PM or midnight, and he would go to bed about 8 or 9:00 in the morning – around the time his young son Juan was getting up. He’d get up around 3 in the afternoon.

We secured an original 1968 IBM Selectric Model I typewriter off of eBay for the play. I learned from working with it that you can lie through a computer really easily. You can delete whole swaths of material real easily. On the typewriter, you have to think continuously. Also, we’re used to firing out our emails right now. Nobody takes time to think about anything. In these letters, he’d stop and start. They would take hours for him to create. And in between, he was hosting a lot of druggie friends and doing a lot of shooting and some traveling …

… He read tremendously. His inventory of magazines and publications was twenty or thirty publications long — newspapers, magazines. And he didn’t just read one side. It’s not as though he just read all the left-wing stuff. He wanted to know what the other side was thinking. He read religiously.

… It’s very easy to translate elements of his frustration — the Vietnam war to the Iraq war; spineless, useless Democrats to spineless, useless Democrats; vile Republicans to vile Republicans. Oil companies fucking everybody.

… He was from an age where men didn’t really talk about their feelings. They kept it locked up. He didn’t believe in psychiatry. He took it on alone. So he was trying to grapple with all of this agony in his personal life. Meanwhile, the country’s disintegrating around him. He got the shit knocked out of him in Chicago [1968] by the police. He started to feel like the whole nation was really slipping into a type of internal Civil War bordering on anarchy.

… He’d already covered very heavy things as a journalist. He had been in South America for a time, and had covered riots down there and had done some tough reports in New York City and the Caribbean. He knew true toughness. He was unafraid to go into it. And remember, Thompson was like 6′5″ and 185 pounds. He was monstrous.

[Link]

Via Boing Boing.