The new Nixon was 'a brute in need of extermination'. Interviewing him during the presidential election of 1968, he found the sleek and polished performer in the New Hampshire primary was no longer 'just another sad old geek limping back for another beating'. Richard Nixon was a particular object of his venom. He wrote about politics, and generally regarded politicians as crooks or charlatans - or both. In the 1960s, he wrote pieces about smugglers, bikers, flower children, migrant workers, hobos and drifters.

Thompson made a journalistic breakthrough with off-beat profiles. He worked intermittently on Prince Jellyfish, an autobiographical novel about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way. Over the following decade, Thompson was, by turns, a prankster, an insubordinate air force enlistee, a copyboy at Time magazine and a failed novelist. On his release from juvenile detention after 30 days, he bought a case of beer and threw one bottle at a time through the window of the school superintendent who had blocked his return to school. Refused permission to take his final examinations, he did not graduate from high school. He was unhappy, deeply rebellious, and was guilty of vandalism, break-ins, heavy drinking and petty theft.Īt the age of 17, he was sentenced to 60 days in the Louisville children's centre for armed robbery. In a childhood marked by family tragedy (his father, an insurance agent, died when his son was 15, leaving the family broke), Thompson went off the rails in a big way. It was the subversive message of both books which hit home. While at high school in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, he read and adored JP Donleavy's raucous novel The Ginger Man, and Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Nuances of its meaning - paranoia, self-absorption, anxiety, rage - made it Thompson's trademark. The phrase was used in his landmark book about Las Vegas in 1973, and repeatedly thereafter. Writing to a friend in November 1963, he used the phrase 'fear and loathing' to describe how he felt at the assassination of President John F Kennedy. He broke every rule in the book, and was crowned in the New York Times as 'our official crazy'. Fantasies were every bit as useful a foundation for his articles as any sober fetish with 'the facts'.

If the quotes he had to hand were boring, he made up new ones if the setting lacked somewhat in vividness, that, too, could be fixed. Unable, and unwilling, to work within the confines of any institution or periodical, it took Thompson a decade to find the distinctive voice that became one of the most strikingly original in American writing.

Hunter s thompson the shark