America's infamous outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson was, like many of his generation, a bone-deep admirer of author Ernest Hemingway, so much so that he even typed out word-for-word two of Hemingway's novels — "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell To Arms." Thompson wanted to feel the rhythm of Hemingway's writing, to grok the flow between thought and page.
Thompson would also go on to imitate Hemingway's head-on immersion in his topics, his macho drinking habits, and eventually, his gun-to-the-head suicide. He never quite managed to emulate Hemingway's success as a novelist, though, instead finding fame with his own brand of "gonzo" first-person journalism.
Thompson did nurse a number of novels, he just rarely finished them, a product of both his own impossibly high bar and the many years of substance abuse. The irony is that Thompson's earliest effort at fiction — "The Rum Diary," written at age 22 and tinkered with extensively in the decades that followed — is not only as good as anything else he'd written, it's probably truer to his own experiences than much of the "journalism" that propelled him to fame, such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."