Melville House Books

If the final instructions of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson are followed out, “the body of the late maverick journalist will be cremated this week and his ashes blasted from a cannon across his sprawling ranch in Woody Creek, Colo.,” reports David Abel in a Boston Globe story. Abel learns this from Thompson’s Boston -based attorney, George Tobia Jr., who also says that “in retrospect does it makes sense that the 67-year-old author sat in his kitchen Sunday afternoon, stuck a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth, and killed himself.” Tobia says “There was no one thing you would point to and say, ‘Oh . . . he’s going to kill himself.’ It wasn’t clear last week suicide was imminent, but now it adds up.” But as David Kipen points out in a San Francisco Chronicle commentary, “speculation in such matters is always reckless, and usually vile.” Says Kipen, “What worries me is that Thompson’s suicide may now make it easier for the forces of reaction to dismiss his achievement. “See what you get, they’ll say, for taking drugs, for mocking authority, for making yourself part of the story?” But, he says, “in case you catch anybody from Fox News or the Cato Institute this week, going on about how Thompson’s end only proves what a hack he always was, just remember that Cato himself fell on his sword rather than live in a world ruled by Caesar, and that after his friends found him and bandaged him up, Cato finished the job by ripping out his own intestines. Does all that unwrite a single word he wrote?” A Guardian tribute emphasizes those writings, listing some of the “best-remembered quotes from the master of the one-liner.” For example, there’s Thompson on the music business: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” It resonates with David Kipen’s closing point about Thompson’s death: “To paraphrase Joe Hill, don’t mourn, read. Pick up ‘Hell’s Angels,’ or either of Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing”‘ books . . . . In the end, only Hunter Thompson knows why he did himself in. Speculation consoles nobody. All that’s left is to keep reading those angry, funny, deeply patriotic books of his.”

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