A Southerner by birth, upbringing, and sensibility, his uncompromising moral voice mediates fear and loathing with violently avenging laughter.
Hunter Stockton Thompson was born 18 July 1939 in Louisville, Kentucky, the first son of insurance agent Jack Robert Thompson and Virginia Ray Thompson. He grew up in a two-story house at 2437 Ransdell Avenue in the quiet, middle-class Cherokee Triangle neighborhood, a suburb abandoned by the old-money elite of Louisville, and attended I. N. Bloom Elementary School where he made friends who would also attend Highland Junior High and Louisville Male High School. His writing career began at the age of ten when he contributed a one-paragraph account of childhood trench warfare, "War," to the Southern Star, a two-page mimeographed newsletter his friends circulated in the neighborhood at four cents a copy. The aggressively competitive Castlewood Athletic Club, a feeder into the city's high schools, initiated him in 1950, but his brief athletic career was stunted by a late growing spurt. In 1952 Thompson's fifty-seven-year-old father died after a three-month stay in the Louisville Veterans Administration Hospital. An autopsy revealed a progressive hereditary neurological disorder that affected the immune system. Virginia Thompson went to work as a secretary and a librarian to support Hunter and his two younger brothers.
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