Outlaw Journalist

Took a little break from my pursuit of Islam. Next book will get me back on track.

William McKeen, “Outlaw Journalist” (The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson), W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd., 2008, 407 pgs;

A must read for anyone going into journalism. It is hard to believe that a man so consumed with pursuing alcohol and drugs could write so well and be so well thought of by other writers, movie stars, and politicians.

The author of this Hunter S. Thompson biography is William McKeen, Chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida. McKeen struck up a friendship with Thompson in the early ‘90s and was able to use that relationship to gain access for interviews with many of Thompson’s closest allies. McKeen traces the entire tale from Thompson’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., to his breakthrough covering the Hell’s Angels, to his run for sheriff of Aspen on a “freak power” ticket to his rise to a fame that imprisoned him in a caricature of himself (ala, Duke in Doonesbury comic strips), to his stunning suicide in 2005 at the age of 67.

Until I read this book, I never heard of Hunter S. Thompson (HST) nor have I read any of his works. He was a regular contributor to “Rolling Stones” as well as to “Playboy” and wrote four or five books. I am too lazy to look them up but may get back to this sometime and read some of them. Anyway, back in the olden days I had heard of some journalist that had ridden with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle group to thereby achieve a more authentic story. I had read of Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury comic strip. Now I find they are one and the same. HST is credited with inventing “Gonzo Journalism”. This is journalism in which the story is mostly about the journalist himself and the process of getting the story. A long way from the journalist as objective recorder.

Pg. 41: In Hunter’s early years he deliberately retyped the Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms because “I just want to feel what it feels like to write that well.” It alerted him to the importance of cadence in writing and he wanted to learn from the best.

PG. 123: Summary of 1968: North Korea seized the USS Pueblo; segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace announced his third-party candidacy for president; Senator Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary rattled President Johnson and forced Senator Robert Kennedy to enter the race; President Johnson shocked the nation by going off script at the end of a televised address on the war and saying he would not seek reelection; a million children in Biafra starved to death in the aftermath of the African nation’s civil war; civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and violence erupted in the nation’s larger cities; Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California primary. And it was only June.