The Washington Post appears to have the first piece that isn't the initial AP story.

Damn.... and I was hoping HST would start a blog. Now THAT would have been worth reading.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972 remains one of the best books written on electoral politics ever.

Hunter S. was a warrior, and will be deeply missed.

I have always respected and admired "The Doctor". I truly mourn his passing. His cynical style, while laugh-out-loud funny, always had an undercurrent that demonstrated the disappointment of a hopeless romantic and an idealist who spent his entire life getting mugged by reality.

He was ferociously informed regarding the big political players and their lackeys and was never able to come to terms with their willingness compromise their alleged principles to retain power. Those who have characterize him as a drug addled humorist, have missed the point entirely and quite probably have not read his work.

John Stewart and Bill Maher are perhaps the only two prominent commenters on current events who truly echo the Thompson sensibility.

I'll miss you Doctor. Drop a couple of hits for me wherever you are.......

I'd add James Carville to the mix, too.

Kari,

You should read HST's Better Than Sex then. The whole Carville-HST connection in it was pretty amusing...

Thanks, CB. It's joining my collection.

The man has written his own epitaph so many times, it's hard to know which to choose. How about:

"Get out of control, but appear under control. It's not bad to alarm other people, though - it's good for them." "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." "Some may never live, but the crazy never die." "The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

And as a bonus, here's an epitaph for a left world:

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts."

RIP, Doctor.

Anthony, I think Kurt Cobain's suicide was a testament to nihilism. He killed himself because he couldn't handle his own notoriety, and he left a brand new baby behind.

Thompson was an iconoclast, not a nihilist. Almost his entire ouvre is populated by skewerings of those whose ego and megalomania knew no bounds. His heroes were those who had little in the way of those tendencies. HST felt pity for McGovern, but there was clearly respect for the way he went about his political life.

I think it's awfully dangerous to take his writings about drug/alcohol use as accurate representations of his factual life. He's said himself, if he'd done everything he wrote in his books he wouldn't have made it to 1980. Obviously he was no stranger to drugs, but far from turning those experiences inward, he expressed them freely and stripped them of the tsk-tsk mentality of the prevailing culture of the times.