In the 1970s, Hunter Thompson inspired a legion of young journalists to believe that the best way to cover a story was to get tanked to the gills on drugs and alcohol, present oneself in a state of near-psychotic meltdown at the scene of whatever one was covering, and record the affronted and sometimes violent reactions of the people one encountered. Concepts like "facts" and "objectivity" were to be regarded as quaint, if not entirely notional. The author became the story. This was "gonzo journalism."

What Thompson himself never felt the need to point out — although other practitioners of what at the time was called the New Journalism, like Tom Wolfe, were quick to note it — was that his gonzo style rested on a foundation of solid journalistic experience. (Although he hadn't actually graduated from high school, Hunter had studied journalism at Columbia University, and he later worked for such publications as Time and the New York Herald Tribune.) Getting loaded didn't make you a journalist; nor did it make you a talented writer (another key requirement of the style). Getting loaded, in the case of most of his many young admirers, simply made them loaded — a time-honored way of avoiding the annoying work of actually sitting down to write the story.

Hunter had immersed himself in the California biker culture to write a 1967 book called "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs." (Still a good read today.) But his later gonzo style only began to emerge in a 1970 article for Scanlan's Monthly called "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." Returning to his home town of Louisville to cover the annual horse race, Thompson had been teamed for the first time with Ralph Steadman, an English illustrator with a spattery, apocalyptic style. "Neither of us had brought any strange illegal drugs," Thompson wrote, "so we would have to get by on booze."

"Hunter S. Thompson, 'Gonzo' Journalism Pioneer, Commits Suicide.")

— Kurt Loder

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