Mylinda Johe's List: journalism

• reporter as part of the story via a first person narrative.
• blend factual and fictional elements to emphasize an underlying message and engage the reader
• Use of quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and even profanity is common. The use of Gonzo journalism suggests that journalism can be truthful without striving for objectivity and is loosely equivalent to an editorial.
• Thompson based his style on William Faulkner's idea that "fiction is often the best fact"^{[citation needed]}. While the things that Thompson writes about are basically true, he uses satirical devices to drive his points home.

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     "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me," he once wrote.
• He was born in Louisville, and after a wild youth entered the Air Force, according to one account, as part of a parole agreement.
• His writing career is traced to the 1950s, when he contributed to a base newspaper while in the Air Force.
• He later wrote unpublished fiction, reported for the mainstream media from Latin America, and made his name with his Hell's Angels article in Harper's magazine.

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• Charged as an accessory to robbery after having been in a car with the person who committed the robbery, Thompson was sentenced to serve 60 days in Kentucky’s Jefferson County Jail. He served 30 days of his sentence, and joined the U.S. Air Force a week after his release.^[
• Thompson did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and later transferred to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to study electronics. He applied to become a pilot but was rejected by the Air Force's aviation-cadet program.
• he worked in the information-services department and became the sports editor of the base's newspaper, The Command Courier. In this capacity, he covered the Eglin Eagles, a base football team that included such future professional stars as Max McGee and Zeke Bratkowski.
• also wrote a sports column anonymously for The Playground News, a local newspaper in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.^[
• After the Air Force, he worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania^[3] before moving to New York City. There he attended Columbia University's School of General Studies part-time on the G.I. Bill, taking classes in short-story writing.^[4]
• During this time he worked briefly for Time, as a copy boy for $51 a week. While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors
• he worked as a reporter for The Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York. He was fired from this job after damaging an office candy machine and arguing with the owner of a local restaurant who happened to be an advertiser with the paper.^[4]
• publish his first magazine feature in the nationally-distributed Rogue magazine on the artisan and bohemian culture of Big Sur. The article got him fired from his job as a caretaker.
• During this period, Thompson wrote two novels, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, and submitted many short stories to publishers with little success. The Rum Diary, which fictionalized Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico, was eventually published in 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.
• Thompson traveled to South America as a correspondent for a Dow Jones-owned weekly newspaper, the National Observer.
• longtime girlfriend Sandra Dawn Conklin
• Thompson and Conklin were married on May 19, 1963, shortly after they returned to the United States. They briefly relocated to Aspen, Colorado, and had one son, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, born March 23, 1964. The couple conceived five more times together. Three of the pregnancies were miscarried, and the other two pregnancies produced infants who died shortly after birth. Hunter and Sandy divorced in 1980 but remained close friends until Thompson's death.
• In 1965, Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, offered Thompson the opportunity to write a story based on his experience with the California-based Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After The Nation published the article (May 17, 1965), Thompson received several book offers and spent the next year living and riding with the Hell's Angels.
• hompson wrote in-depth about the hippies of San Francisco, deriding a culture that began to lack the political convictions of the New Left and the artistic core of the Beats, instead becoming overrun with newcomers lacking any purpose other than obtaining drugs.^[11] It was an observation on the 60s' counterculture that Thompson would further examine in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other articles.
• By late 1967, Thompson and his family moved back to Colorado and rented a house in Woody Creek, a small mountain hamlet outside Aspen. In early 1969, Thompson finally received a $15,000 royalty check for the paperback sales of Hells Angels and used two-thirds of the money for a down payment on a modest home and property in Woody Creek where Thompson would live for the rest of his life.^[14] He named the house Owl Farm and often described this house as his "fortified compound".
• In 1970 Thompson ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, as part of a group of citizens running for local offices on the "Freak Power" ticket. The platform included promoting the decriminalization of drugs (for personal use only, not trafficking, as he disapproved of profiteering), tearing up the streets and turning them into grassy pedestrian malls, banning any building so tall as to obscure the view of the mountains, and renaming Aspen "Fat City" to deter investors. Thompson, having shaved his head, referred to his opponent as "my long-haired opponent", as the Republican candidate had a crew cut.
• Tom Wolfe would later describe Thompson's style as "...part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric."^[36]
• Thompson continued to contribute irregularly to Rolling Stone. "Fear and Loathing in Elko," published in 1992, was a well-received fictional rallying cry against Clarence Thomas, while "Mr. Bill's Neighborhood" was a largely non-fictional account of an interview with Bill Clinton in an Arkansas diner.

• Thompson was named a Kentucky Colonel by the Governor of Kentucky in a December 1996 tribute ceremony where he also received keys to the city of Louisville.^[27]

   

   

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• Thompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" known as "Owl Farm" in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
• They reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at a gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with him when he ended his life.

• What family and police describe as a suicide note was delivered to his wife four days before his death and later published by Rolling Stone. Entitled "Football Season Is Over", it read:

   

   

  "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."^[30
• On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot (47 m) tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", known to be the song most respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable permanent location can be found.
• hompson almost always wrote in the first person, while extensively using his own experiences and emotions to color "the story" he was trying to follow. His writing aimed to be humorous, colorful, and bizarre, and he often exaggerated events to be more entertaining.

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