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

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 and H. L. Mencken, indignant savagers of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He also seems, by virtue of the "outlaw" accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from "The Great Gatsby," just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald's novel was continually on his mind while he was working on "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called "The Death of the American Dream," a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliche that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck. Still, it pleased him to remember that Fitzgerald had once thought of calling "Gatsby" "The Death of the Red White and Blue."

Thompson emerged on the scene in the late nineteen-sixties. His first book, on the Hell's Angels (which originated as an article in The Nation in 1965), was published in 1967, when he was thirty, after a career path in journalism that resembled a trip through a pinball machine. The book brought Thompson to the attention of the mainstream press, and he was quick to squander the opportunity. Commissioned by Playboy to produce a profile of the Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy, he handed in a lengthy piece in which he suggested that, "on balance, it seems unfair to dismiss him as a witless greedhead, despite all the evidence." Playboy killed it. "This is our last adventure with H. Thompson," one editor wrote. But Thompson found a ...