The One and Only Gonzo Journalist: Hunter S. Thompson

As the Great Depression dissipated into the post-World World War II boom, the dawn of the 1960s signaled the arrival of radical social, political, and cultural change in the United States. While the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, and emergence of the counterculture highlighted the political controversy surrounding the nation at the time, a cultural renaissance soon replaced the traditions of art, music, and literature with much more experimental and alternative forms. 

In a similar fashion, a new wave of journalism began to develop in the 1960s that abandoned the conventions of objective reporting and instead focused on the writer as an essential part of the story. As a member of the New Journalism movement, Hunter S. Thompson crafted a unique writing style that embodied the drugs, free love, and rebellion of the 1960s counterculture. Today, Thompson’s gonzo journalism no longer possesses the novelty that it once had more than thirty years ago, but his legacy as a countercultural icon continues to resonate with American popular culture. 

My purpose here is not to simply recount Thompson's life but rather to investigate the early perceptions of his unusual lifestyle and literary work as compared to his public image in contemporary American society. These various responses and attitudes then and now will ultimately demonstrate the impact that gonzo journalism had on American culture in the 1960s and beyond.

In the early 1960s, a group of young journalists and former novelists developed a style of factual reporting that expanded the boundaries of American journalism. Stemming from the work of Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s and Jack Kerouac in the 1940s and 1950s, Tom Wolfe pioneered this movement that would later be classified as New Journalism. The movement was born when Wolfe sent his editor an unstructured narrative letter in place of a more traditional news story.