The American journalist Hunter Stockton Thompson (born 1937) was known as one of the best examples of "Gonzo" journalism. His political and cultural criticism of the United States in the 1970s was largely a series of tales flowing from his eccentric pers...

Hunter S. Thompson created an explosive, first-person, gonzo style of reportage that brashly pushed the language and limits of American literary journalism into boldly original new directions. With weird humor and strident apocalyptic invective, his frac...

Hunter S. Thompson ranks among the first and foremost practitioners of New Journalism, a genre that evolved in the 1960s to reflect the particular mood of those times. Thompson, who has called his brand of reporting "Gonzo Journalism," was perhaps the mo...

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN By Charles Bock Random House. 417 pp. $25 Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock's exceptional Beautiful Children, so much as the starting point...

GONZO The Life of Hunter S. Thompson An Oral Biography By Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour Little, Brown. 467 pp. $28.99 Reading "Gonzo" takes us back to a counterculture moment in U.S. history that seemed very modern and...

The role of drugs in the creation of two "gonzo journalism" works of literature: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson, and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Thomas Wolfe. The drugs in the both works served to both stimulate creativity and cause personal destruction.