The Birth of Gonzo
I can’t remember when I wrote this or who asked me to write this. Seems like the attic is a good place for things like this

Like artificial sweetener and Post-It Notes, Gonzo Journalism was born of desperation and error. On a foul spring afternoon in 1970, barricaded in a room at the Royalton Hotel on 44th Street in New York, Hunter S. Thompson stared at the paper in the machine before him, wondering what the hell he was going to do. Then came the knock at the door and the arrival of the copy courier, working for the editors down the street in the office of Scanlan’s Monthly. Earlier, Thompson had handed the boy what he’d completed, the first part of his story on the Kentucky Derby. But when the telltale knock came again, Thompson was still staring at empty paper in his wretched typewriter. To feed the editors, he ripped several sheets of scribbling – on yellow, legal-sized paper – from his notepad, and sent the boy on his way. When the boy left, Thompson sat, finished his cigarette, and began packing for his return home to Colorado. My career is over, he thought. I’ll never work in this business again.
“I was full of grief and shame,” Thompson recalled. “It was the worst hole I’d ever gotten into. I was finished. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”
Then came another knock at the door. Please sir, can I have some more? The boy was back. Turns out the editors had liked Thompson’s notes and planned to print them word for word, unedited, in the magazine. So he gave the boy more notes.
“The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” appeared in the magazine the following week. By then, Thompson was back in his fortified compound outside Woody Creek, Colorado, but soon the messages started to arrive. He’d written to his friend Bill Cardoso that he had produced a piece of irresponsible journalism. The letters and phone calls made him think he might’ve short-changed himself. After reading the piece, it was Cardoso who wrote back with the greatest praise. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing,” he said, “but you’ve changed everything. It’s totally gonzo.”
Cardoso worked at the Boston Globe and gonzo was local bar slang. It meant the last man standing after a night of heavy drinking. Others called the piece a breakthrough, the next step in the evolution of journalism. It was both the best and the worst thing to happen to Hunter S. Thompson. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times? It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”
It was good because Thompson’s realization that his unedited, unpolished notes made for exciting reading was tremendously liberating for him as a writer. It was bad because it meant that he could publish his unedited, unpolished notes.
Gonzo followed Hunter S. Thompson until that grim February day when he sucked the metallic popsicle and left the material world. Late in his career, when he suffered cocaine-induced writer’s block, he often cursed the day he’d discovered gonzo. His epiphany — that his raw, unedited notes could be published — came after a long struggle to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Hunter S. Thompson arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, the same time as the devastating flood of 1937. Unlike the flood waters, Thompson never receded and remained even after his death a force in American letters.
He was the eldest of three sons of Jack and Virginia Thompson. His father was older and on his second marriage (there was a child from the first, but he remained distant from his younger half siblings) and was not the sort of young hands-on father he saw guiding his childhood friends. Jack Thompson was an insurance salesman, chain-smoker and observer of his son’s life, not a participant. He was soon dead and young Thompson’s mother, a researcher at Louisville Free Public Library, retreated into a haze of alcoholism as her eldest son ran roughshod.
Though firmly entrenched the city’s lower middle class, Thompson was the mascot of the city’s burgeoning social set. Louisville attracted new businesses in the post-war era and the young executives raised their children in a cloistered society modeled on the classic rules of Southern civility and custom. The children, however, did not care for the genteel; they wanted to flirt with danger. This brought young ruffian Hunter Thompson into their circles, as a token bad boy. Thompson was thus ushered into the upper-crust Athenaeum Literary Society as a high school student. Just prior to graduation, however, he learned the realities of the haves and have nots. With two of his society friends, he attempted to rob two couples making out in a car in Louisville’s Cherokee Park. When charges were brought, the two other swains got them dropped, owing to their connections. Absent such connections, Thompson was sentenced to 60 days in jail, missing the graduation ceremony.
After jail, Thompson enlisted in the Air Force, he began his professional writing career as sports editor of the Command Courier at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida’s Panhandle. After leaving the service, he floated around the bowels of journalism at newspapers in rural Pennsylvania and upstate New York. These jobs were all short-term and filled with drama. He left one job after wrecking a colleague’s car. At another newspaper, he was let go for destroying a vending machine. Thus unemployed, he lived in upstate New York with friends and in an abandoned, unheated cabin, vowing to become a writer “until the dark thumb of fate” crushed him into nothingness.
He drifted through the Caribbean and South America, eventually finding the freelance role worked well for him. Considering his unorthodox style, his venue was a mismatch: The National Observer, conceived as the Sunday edition of The Wall Street Journal. But Thompson’s honest prose and his ability to find unusual stories everywhere caught the eye of an editor who encouraged the young writer to deliver literate, personal narratives of a fish out of water.
Back in the states, however, he thought it best to keep his distance from the cubicled office and, with his new wife, Sandra Dawn, he ended up in San Francisco as the Observer correspondent for the birth of the counter culture in the mid-1960s. A disagreement with editors soon ended his relationship with the Observer and his main contribution to his family’s income came from donating blood. He did get an assignment to do apiece on the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang for The Nation. He introduced himself to the Angels — which no previous reporters had done — and wrote a piece called ‘Losers and Outsiders’ that brought a lot of attention when it appeared. Soon, Thompson’s mailbox was stuffed with offers from publishers who wanted him to expand the article into a book. A self-described lazy hillbilly, he chose to go with Ballantine, which wanted a paperback original. It didn’t require a prospectus or other examples of salesmanship the other publishers asked for.
Thompson rode with the motorcycle gang for a year, though not on a Harley Davidson. He trailed them in his Rambler, observed their lifestyle and earned their confidence. Eventually, however, they turned on Thompson and beat him. Angels leader Sonny Barger maintained that Thompson provoked the beating in order to give himself an ending for his book. By the time the book was published, Ballantine’s editors considered it too good to be a paperback original, and it was published in hardcover — Hell’s Angels (Random House, 1967).
The editors wanted something else from Thompson and he sold them on the concept on a book about the “death of the American Dream.” But after three years of research, he was unable to come to terms with the ponderous project. He did find his distinctive style while ripping through a series of pay-the-bills assignments for small magazines. In one of the pieces, he described his homecoming to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby and ended up giving editors his unedited notes to complete the story. When the magazine published this straight-from-the-brain prose, it was hailed as the next step in the evolution of journalism. A friend of Hunter’s called it ‘gonzo.’
Thompson and his wife and son had moved to Woody Creek, Colorado, outside of Aspen, and he ran for county sheriff. He sought out Rolling Stone magazine, in San Francisco, to publish a story about his Freak Power campaign and to raise awareness. The campaign failed, but thus began Thompson’s longest professional association — with Jann Wenner, founder and editor of Rolling Stone. The next year (1971), while doing a serious assignment on the murder of a Chicano reporter for the magazine, he interrupted his work to take his key source to Las Vegas to accompany him on his Sports Illustrated assignment to cover a motorcycle race. That aborted assignment led to Thompson’s creative nonfiction masterpiece, published in the magazine in November 1971. When it appeared in book form the next year — as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Random House, 1972) — Thompson was in the middle of covering the presidential campaign for the magazine, resulting in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (Straight Arrow, 1973).
Thompson’s active career as a journalist was curtailed by his fame. When he attempted to cover the Senate hearings on Watergate in 1973 or the beginnings of the 1976 presidential campaign, he discovered that other journalists surrounded him, asking for autographs, making it impossible for him to work. He was also divorcing his wife and had discovering cocaine, the one drug that seemed to hamper his writing ability. He laid low for a few years, spending much of his time in Key West, and published little, other than his career omnibus, The Great Shark Hunt (Summit, 1979). A few years later, another attempt at recapturing his early fire — The Curse of Lono (Bantam, 1983) — fell flat.

He gave up being a reporter and became a reactor. Back in Woody Creek, he discovered satellite dishes and cable news and spent the rest of his career reacting to the news he saw on television. His screeds found an audience of devoted fans and filled several books: Generation of Swine (Summit, 1988), Songs of the Doomed (Summit, 1991), Better than Sex (Random House, 1994) and Kingdom of Fear (Simon and Schuster, 2003). His continuing commercial success allowed him to publish his 1959 novel The Rum Diary (Simon and Schuster, 1998).
The pop-culture caricature of his personality – as a drug-gobbling and drunken madman – soon eclipsed his offstage personality as a serious writer. As a lazy hillbilly, however, he began to realize that he could make a living with self-parody and he did so. He watered and manured his image and allowed filmmakers turn him into the subject of a comic film, Where the Buffalo Roam (1981). Despite the film’s faults, it contained Bill Murray’s terrific performance as Thompson. Later, actor Johnny Depp, another Thompson acolyte, played him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and The Rum Diary (2012).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Thompson struggled to write a book for which he was contracted with Random House. The subject, as defined by Thompson, was the death of the American Dream. He made many attempts over several years, but was unable to wrestle that ponderous topic between covers. The late 1960s, he ended up accepting magazine assignments that might produce articles that, when assembled, might get to the subject he had in mind.
One such assignment came from Playboy in 1969. He was assigned to profile the French Olympic skier, Jean-Claude Killy. Killy, portrayed in the mainstream press as a handsome French rake, was working as a pitchman for Chevrolet in a new series of television commercials. Playboy assigned Thompson to write a by-the-numbers profile of the new romantic athlete, with the ulterior motive of getting Chevrolet advertising.
What soon became clear to Thompson was Killy’s all-embracing disdain for American cars. Thompson also found him quite dull. At one point, he confronted Killy with his problem as a writer. He found it grueling to write about Killy because the man was so dull. Killy shrugged. “Maybe you could write about how hard it is to write about me,” he said.
And that was it. Thompson began his practice of writing stories about trying to write stories. No matter the assignment, he wrote about Hunter Thompson trying to write a story. That was the model he followed for the remainder of his career.
He completed the story on Killy and used another journalist – Bill Cardoso of the Boston Globe – as a confederate. Thus began the Thompson literary device of employing a sidekick as a sounding board. He used Cardoso to vent his frustration and to share his ideas about trying to write a story about a staggeringly tedious man.
Playboy aggressively rejected the article because Thompson reported Killy’s scorn for Chevrolet. Any hope of advertising would evaporate with the story as written. Thompson was furious and wrote to his friend Warren Hinckle, then publishing a magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly. Thompson spewed his bile for Playboy and sent the article, along with his letter, to Hinckle. Both letter and article were printed in the magazine, including Thompson’s reference to the Playboy editors as “scurvy fist-fuckers to the last man.”
For his next Scanlan’s assignment, Thompson was paired with Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman, who was making his first trip to the United States. Hinckle sent Thompson back to his hometown of Louisville, to cover the Kentucky Derby. It was a righteous pairing, as Thompson used Steadman-as-sidekick to explain what sorts of pictures fresh-off-the-boat Steadman needed to draw to accompany the article that he – Thompson – was having such difficulty writing.
And it was difficult. And that’s when he began passing unedited sheets torn from his reporter’s notepad to the Scanlan’s editors and discovered that they planned to print them verbatim in the magazine.
Cardoso was thinking of Boston bars when he called the writing gonzo.The word might have appealed to Thompson because back in the late 1950s, stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, he’d listen to WWL from New Orleans late at night, where the disk jockeys regularly played the instrumental “Gonzo” by James Booker.
Whatever the source of the word – and there is a French Canadian gonzeaux — it soon became the catchphrase for whatever Thompson wrote. The question became this: was gonzo the sole intellectual property of Hunter S. Thompson?

There had been antecedents. Writer Terry Southern had experimented with this metajournalism when he wrote “Twirling at Ole Miss” for Esquire in July 1962. Sent to Oxford, Mississippi, to cover a baton-twirling summer camp, Southern spent his article describing the difficulty of writing his article – primarily because, in a monument to political incorrectness, he could not concentrate because of the lust he felt for his adolescent subjects. It was an article about the difficulty of writing an article.
When “Twirling at Ole Miss” was printed, Thompson was an obscure American freelance lobbing stories stateside from remote outposts in South America. No one called Southern’s work gonzo, though it fit the later definition of metajournalism.
After Thompson embraced Cardoso’s term, it became too closely associated with Thompson to be successfully appropriated by other writers. Thompson’s device worked well in the book-length Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Random House, 1972), in which he wrote about trying and failing to produce articles on two events in that city. Thompson then spent a year covering the battle for the presidency between incumbent Richard Nixon and challenger George McGovern. Thompson’s biweekly articles in Rolling Stone watered and manured his image as a man in constant struggle to meet deadlines. The process of writing was the subject of his writing. Those reports were later collected as Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.
Thompson’s fortuitous meeting with historian Douglas Brinkley led to two collections of Thompson’s correspondence, both edited by Brinkley: The Proud Highway (Villard, 1997) and Fear and Loathing in America (Simon and Schuster, 2000). He wrote columns for the ESPN website collected as Hey Rube (Simon and Schuster, 2004).
Divorced since the early 1980s, Thompson had a series of romances, including a long relationship producer Laila Nabulsi, who managed to do the impossible, translating his supposedly unfilmable book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, into a film (directed by Terry Gilliam.) Thompson met Anita Bejmuk when he became one of his editorial assistants. They wed in 2003.
Despondent over failing health and the nation’s political direction, Thompson committed suicide by gunshot on February 20, 2005. His high-profile funeral – during which his ashes were blasted from a cannon, accompanied by fireworks – was attended by the clerisy of Hollywood and Washington.
Those attempting to write gonzo soon realizejii what an ill-fitting suit of clothes it was.
I’ve been trying to help students learn to write for 40 years and — in his strange way — Hunter Thompson has helped me a lot. Because often, late in the semester, students will ask me if they can write a gonzo. Sure, I say, knock yourself out. Of course, they fail miserably. When they do, it helps make my point. “Only one person could write like that and he’s dead,” “I tell them. “But no one else can write like you.”
Copyright © 2025 William McKeen