Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide

Hunter S. Thompson, the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author whose drug- and alcohol-fueled diatribes pioneered gonzo journalism and made him a counterculture hero, committed suicide at his Colorado home Sunday night. He was 67.

Thompson's son, Juan, released a statement saying his father had died as the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at the writer's Owl Creek residence near Aspen.

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," said the statement.

Thompson's wife, Anita, had reportedly left the house before the shooting and it was Juan who later found the body. No other details were disclosed, including whether the writer left behind a note.

Thompson's gunplay was the stuff of legend. Four years ago, he accidentally shot and wounded his assistant while trying to chase away a bear from his Aspen home.

Friends say Thompson had not seemed depressed of late, despite a series of medical woes. He broke his leg while vacationing in Hawaii in 2003, and was in pain from back surgery and a hip-replacement procedure.

Along with contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, Thompson was at the vanguard of 1960s journalism movement that tossed aside objectivity in favor of first-person accounts in which the writers became central characters.

The style came to be called New Journalism, or as Thompson preferred, "gonzo journalism." His motto: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

A heavy drinker and notorious drug abuser, Thompson's hard-living ways and larger-than-life persona became the prism through which he criticized what he perceived as America's cultural and political excesses and hypocrisies via countless newspaper and magazine articles and nearly a dozen books.

In the early 1970's, his fame as an outlaw journalist reached its apex when Rolling Stone magazine published his 1972 magnum opus, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

The two-part piece, which was later released as a book, followed the hilarious psychedelic misadventures of his alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his crazed Samoan lawyer through Sin City's underbelly in search of the American Dream--all while nominally covering a desert motorcycle race. The cult classic was eventually turned into the 1998 movie directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.

Thompson followed up that bit of hallucinatory prose with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, in which Thompson provoked both outrage and acclaim after calling President Nixon and his "Barbie Doll" family "America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us."

He didn't have any kind remarks to offer Nixon's opponent either, blasting Hubert Humphrey as a "shallow contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack." The book spawned the 1980 flick Where the Buffalo Roam, in which Thompson was played by Bill Murray.

Garry Trudeau solidified Thompson's counterculture icon status by creating the Doonesbury character Uncle Duke--complete with bald pate and omnipresent cigarette holder--in honor of Thompson.

Thompson wrote his first novel, The Rum Diary, in 1958, but it wasn't published until 1998. He was up to his old tricks in his most recent book, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness, which skewered the presidency of George W. Bush. He also penned a sports column for ESPN.com.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18, 1937, Hunter Stockton Thompson grew up the son of an insurance agent in a middle-class family. After graduating high school, he joined the Air Force, where he got his start in journalism as a sports editor. After an honorable discharge in 1958, Thompson took up writing full-time, doing pieces for small-town papers. His breakthrough came when he was assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," Thompson told Playboy years later. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

The piece was hailed as a masterpiece of reportage and suddenly Thompson found himself, as he described it, "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids."

He took a job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Puerto Rico, which he used as the basis for Rum Diary. He attracted more attention in 1965 for a story on the Hell's Angels that was eventually collected into the book of the same name.

Aside from Hell's Angels, his compilations included The Proud Highway, Generation of Swine, The Great Shark Hunt and Songs for the Doomed.

Thompson's work will continue to be Hollywood fodder after his death. Depp is set to play the author again opposite Del Toro in The Rum Diary, set for release later this year. Del Toro makes his directorial debut on the film, which costars Josh Hartnett and Nick Notle. Meanwhile, Sean Penn, had been collaborating with Thompson on a film version of the author's The Curse of Lono.

He is survived by his wife and son. Details for his funeral and a memorial have not yet been announced.