BELIEVER.(author Hunter S. Thompson)(Obituary)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-MAR-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer. And although the drugs and the guns and the whole paranoid "gonzo" routine long ago became tiresome and embarrassing--they were pretty embarrassing from the start, actually--the news of his death hit a nerve. He was one of the last of the true believers.

There is a lot of edge in the Thompson style, and this gets him compared with people like Lenny Bruce...

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