The Brief Rise and Prolonged Fall of Gonzo Journalism

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

So begins Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the book that was first published in two issues of Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and propelled Thompson and his revolutionary "Gonzo" journalism into the spotlight. As the subtitle warns, the book takes readers on "a savage journey to the heart of the American dream," and it also sealed Thompson's burgeoning reputation as an outlaw genius. The time was right - Thompson had put himself in place to be the living historian of the counterculture.

At the same time, he had introduced his Gonzo style to journalism. Gonzo is characterized by a flamboyant writing style that blurs the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and nonfiction. The reporter becomes intrinsically enmeshed with the subject and the action, rather than being a passive observer.

Although Thompson did not coin the term, "gonzo" has become synonymous with his name. The word was first used by Boston Globe reporter Bill Cardoso who, after reading Thompson's infamous 1970 article on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's Monthly, reportedly proclaimed "This is pure Gonzo!"

The term has now become a bona-fide style of writing that concerns itself with "telling it like it is" and is a closely related offshoot of the New Journalism practiced by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. (The word has also found a place in the twenty-plus volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Thompson's article "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" was first published in Scanlan's Monthly, the short lived monthly sporting magazine that ran for only two years, and offered his first foray into the realm of Gonzo - before Gonzo even existed as such.