Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby to learn how Fitzgerald wrote
Working as a Time magazine copy boy for $51 a week in the late 1950s, Hunter S. Thompson sat at his typewriter copying out pages of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, trying to absorb their rhythm. Time fired him for insubordination in 1959. It was one sacking in a long run of them.
Trouble arrived early. Raised in Louisville, where his mother became head librarian after his father died when Hunter was 14, he joined an exclusive literary club and helped produce its yearbook. In 1955 he was charged as an accessory to robbery for being in a car with the culprit and served 31 days in jail, which cost him his high school graduation. He then joined the Air Force, where he talked his way into a sports editor's job by lying about his experience and wrote a newspaper column under no byline, since outside work was banned. His commander recommended early discharge, writing that the talented airman would not be guided by policy.
After Time, a paper in Middletown, New York, fired him for damaging a candy machine and quarrelling with a restaurant owner who advertised in its pages. A sports magazine in Puerto Rico folded soon after he arrived, and The San Juan Star turned him down, though its editor, William Kennedy, became a friend. Those island years fed The Rum Diary, finally published in 1998. He spent a year in South America as a correspondent for the National Observer.
His break came in 1965 when The Nation hired him to write about the Hells Angels. He spent the next year riding with the club until the bikers decided he was profiting off them; the relationship ended with a brutal beating at a party. The book Hell's Angels made his name. A 1970 piece on the Kentucky Derby launched what he called Gonzo, reporting in which the writer is part of the story, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas followed, serialised in Rolling Stone.
In 1970, the year of the Derby piece, he also ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on a Freak Power ticket and lost. From the mid-1970s his output faded amid fame and heavy substance use. He died by suicide in 2005, aged 67.
Source: Hunter S. Thompson
