Melville House Books

Rolling Stone wasn’t exactly known for political reporting when Dr. Hunter S. Thompson began writing for it. Now, in this remembrance, the magazine’s James Sullivan remembers the publication’s most famous contributor, and how he once said that “his realization that he could ‘get away with’ such an outrageous writing style convinced him to stop trying to write ‘like the New York Times. It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.’” Meanwhile, an Associated Press wire story by Robert Weller says some friends are speculating that “the writer had been in a lot of pain after a broken leg and hip surgery.” The owner of a local tavern where Thompson hung out tells Waller, “I wasn’t surprised. I never expected Hunter to die in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of him.” Mike Cleverly, a friend who spent Friday night watching a basketball game with Thompson, however, says, “Medically speaking, he’s had a rotten year,” he said. However, Cleverly says, “he’s the last person in the world I would have expected to kill himself. I would have been less surprised if he had shot me.” A moving appreciation by David Carr at The New York Times offers another theory: ” Friends say that he appeared to be relatively happy of late, and was fully engaged in the writing projects he had before him. But a chronic series of physical infirmities — he had to use a wheelchair at times — left him feeling that he was finally being maneuvered by forces he could not medicate or write into obscurity. And his suicide had its own terrible logic. A man who was so intent on generating a remarkable voice that he retyped Hemingway’s novels just to understand how it was done, gave a final bit of dramatic tribute in turning a gun on himself. “

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.