Proud Highway

I’ve compromised myself so often that I can’t honestly see myself as a martyr anymore.… I think I’m probably better off as an opportunist with a large and ill-formed talent.”

But odd things occur when you intersect with Hunter Thompson. Life happens to him in ways alien to most mortals. In the exchange of letters cited above (fully rendered in the pages that follow) there lurks prophecy—of Hunter’s future as a masterful American prose stylist and journalistic fictionist, and also of the lifestyle that has served him so well: creating chaos to undercut his own most cherished schemes, courting self-destruction as the avenue to success, maintaining a symbiotic colloquy with comic despair, and coping with bronze plaquery and other rejection through Avenger’s Rhetoric, e.g., from 1965 to a dilatory editor: “I’m coming to New York on a chopped hog and shoot you in the gut with an expanding filth flare”; from 1967 on his plans for chastising a literary agent: “cracking his teeth with a knotty stick and rupturing every other bone and organ I can make contact with in the short time I expect will be allotted to me.”