The Gonzo has died. We watched part of the film Fear and Loathing in Los Vagas last term - which is part of the story of a man who changed journalism in our times.
Here is the obituary from his home town paper:

Flamboyant Thompson was 'promise unfulfilled'

Littwin: Thompson true to caricature he created

Ripples spread far from writer's work

Thompson dissected the illness of a nation going out of control

By Duane Davis, Special to the News
February 22, 2005

I first came across Hunter Thompson's writing just before I got out of the Army in 1967.

I was just starting to get curious about beatniks and hippies and, having already read Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, was easily taken in by a book with the lurid (and alluring) title, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

It was a good book, but not a great one. The main problem seemed to be that the writing didn't quite measure up to the material, that the author was not equal to his subject.

What I wanted were words as wild and dangerous as the ideas, people and events being described. I wanted sentences and paragraphs that whipped off the page and assaulted what I knew already, what I'd been taught about the way things are.

What I wanted from Thompson, it turned out, was still a few years away, but when it came, it descended like the whirlwind on Job. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), was just what I was looking for.

The '60s were dead and gone. The Age of Aquarius had started to shift into moral malaise and counterculture collapse. Hippies were poised to become businessmen: dealing drugs or enlightenment or some weird combination of the two. The Silent Majority had roused from its slumbers and was looking for payback.

It had been crazy. It was about to get crazier. And just when it seemed like it might be a good time to cash out, Hunter Thompson came into his own.

In the '70s, reading Thompson was a rite of passage. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was quickly followed by Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Taken together, the books were fever charts of an America gone bad in the head and sick in the heart. Thompson was onto something: power, drugs, and madness; paranoia, megalomania and an arrogance not seen since the last days of the Roman Empire. He knew the names of the beast: Amerika, Vietnam, Watts, Newark, Columbia, Watergate, the Chicago Seven, SDS, the Black Panthers.

Thompson's writing was a mirror held up to our own faces contorted in the paroxysms of what we expected to be the end of the world. Thompson wrote it all down, and no matter how weird he got, it was never weird enough: Real life always sneaked past and waited around the corner with something even crazier, sicker, more dangerous. So we read Thompson as a form of self-diagnosis. While we were taking his pulse, we were checking our own.

Thompson wasn't the first. He wasn't even particularly the best. But he was the craziest.

If you wanted Edge, real edge, you read the Good Doctor.

We survived the '70s. So did Thompson. He continued to write and eventually the shelf came to hold a number of books: Four volumes of the Gonzo Papers: The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine, Songs of the Doomed, and Better Than Sex; two collections of letters: The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America; and, in the last couple of years, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube.

For a few years, Thompson had been carefully defining himself as a writer rather than reporter. Some said this was a way for him to avoid being to taken to task for a career of sloppy journalism and made-up "news" stories.

My take is a little kinder. The Good Doctor knew that "journalism" is what goes into newspapers: read in an hour and tossed aside. What he wrote, especially the two Fear And Loathing books and the first two collections in the Gonzo Papers, attempt literature.

He was a Jeremiah for our time, a crazed, coked-up, gun-totin' prophet. He shouted, I think, in order to make us hear. And now that the Good Doctor has left the office, you better believe that, wherever he has gone, they're going to need to lay in a good supply of earplugs. He went out shouting - and there are a lot of us left behind who can still hear him, raging into that good night.

Duane Davis is co-owner of Wax Trax Records and a News book critic. He reviewed Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear" in 2002.

 Hunter S. Thompson dies
Last Updated Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:31:24 EST
CBC Arts

ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo," has killed himself, his son said.

In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday night. He was 67.

Hunter Thompson, centre, with Benicio Del Toro, left, and Johnny Depp at a New York premiere for the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," his son said in the statement.

The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.

Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.

He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.

But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.

In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.

A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).

Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.

He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.

He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).

He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.

He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.

Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).