M
mlchance
Guest
From First Things (May 2005):
At age sixty-seven, Hunter S. Thompson, author of the pharmaceutically inspired “Fear and Loathing” books, was taking a call from his wife whom he asked to come home to help with the writing of a column. In the middle of the conversation, without saying anything out of the ordinary, he put down the phone and fired a .45-caliber bullet into his mouth.
“I heard the clicking of the gun,” Anita Thompson said. “I was waiting for him to get back on the phone.”
Hunter’s son, daughter-in-law, and six-year-old grandson were a few yards away in adjoining rooms when he killed himself. The Rocky Mountain News reported: “Hunter S. Thompson died Sunday as he planned, surrounded by his family, at a high point in his life, and with a single, courageous, and fatal gunshot wound to the head, his son says.”
The son and daughter-in-law declared they “could not be prouder” of his suicide. The family gathered around the body sitting in the kitchen chair and toasted his achievement with Chivas Regal, Hunter’s alcoholic favorite.
“It was very loving,” said Anita Thompson. “This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure.”
In the days following, numerous writers reminisced about a wild night once spent with Thompson, and generally agreed that his exit was in character. He was really something. Novelist Tom Wolfe declared him the Mark Twain of his century.
In the post-suicide kitchen party, the six-year-old grandson is not quoted.
– Mark L. Chance.
At age sixty-seven, Hunter S. Thompson, author of the pharmaceutically inspired “Fear and Loathing” books, was taking a call from his wife whom he asked to come home to help with the writing of a column. In the middle of the conversation, without saying anything out of the ordinary, he put down the phone and fired a .45-caliber bullet into his mouth.
“I heard the clicking of the gun,” Anita Thompson said. “I was waiting for him to get back on the phone.”
Hunter’s son, daughter-in-law, and six-year-old grandson were a few yards away in adjoining rooms when he killed himself. The Rocky Mountain News reported: “Hunter S. Thompson died Sunday as he planned, surrounded by his family, at a high point in his life, and with a single, courageous, and fatal gunshot wound to the head, his son says.”
The son and daughter-in-law declared they “could not be prouder” of his suicide. The family gathered around the body sitting in the kitchen chair and toasted his achievement with Chivas Regal, Hunter’s alcoholic favorite.
“It was very loving,” said Anita Thompson. “This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure.”
In the days following, numerous writers reminisced about a wild night once spent with Thompson, and generally agreed that his exit was in character. He was really something. Novelist Tom Wolfe declared him the Mark Twain of his century.
In the post-suicide kitchen party, the six-year-old grandson is not quoted.
– Mark L. Chance.