On one level, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's career can be described simply: He was a writer who wrote best when loaded. Sure, you say, but tell me which great American writer wasn't a raging alcoholic. F. Scott Fitzgerald? Jack Kerouac? Ernest Hemingway? William "There is no such thing as a bad whiskey" Faulkner? Oh, wait, I got it — Charles Bukowski, ha ha ha ha.
And yet, with the possible exception of Bukowski, Thompson had no peer when it came to excess. Who else would cover a national district attorneys' conference on narcotics while off his face on psychedelics, as Thompson did in his classic 1972 novel "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"? (His logic: "If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level drug conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.")
This book, which walked a very fine line between incisive first-person reporting and flights of dope-induced fantasy, established Thompson's utterly unique style of "gonzo" journalism. "Bad craziness" was his beat, and while someone such as Tom Wolfe could embed himself into a situation and report from an intimate yet hands-clean vantage point, Thompson, as often as not, plunged in headfirst. These days, his acid-rush ravings may seem as much a hippie cliche as a tie-dyed T-shirt — cue the hallucinations of lizards and bats — but his scathing prose, fueled by a disillusioned idealism, continues to amaze. The author's legend lives on, despite the fact that he checked himself out in 2006 at the age of 67 with a well-aimed .45-caliber bullet to the head.