Hunter S Thompson: An Insider’s View of Deranged, Depraved, Drugged Out Brilliance
By Jay Cowan
The Lyons Press £14.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

You have to be of a certain generation and a certain mindset to appreciate the ranting and rambunctious life of Hunter S Thompson. He emerged during America’s counter-cultural moment, “a defrocked southern gentleman”, in Jay Cowan’s words, “with a wicked tongue and a long list of lusts and loathings”.

He was, for a short and pyrotechnical time, that moment’s leading advocate and chronicler. He produced a clutch of books that still stand handsomely in the tradition of great American reportage, although his idiosyncratic take on that genre wilfully alienated the country’s mainstream.

Thompson invented “gonzo” journalism, a style that not only disregarded the strictures of objectivity and dispassion, but positively insisted on the journalist immersing himself in the story, preferably consuming copious amounts of drink and drugs.

Thompson’s style was the flip side of the meticulous and scrupulous Washington Post journalists who brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. He would love to have been responsible for deposing an American president, particularly that one. But his bombastic prose was designed to entertain rather than confront political power.

Cowan was Thompson’s neighbour and friend – no small feat in itself; the portrait he draws so vividly here reminds us of a different time, more forgiving of eccentricity and able to absorb maverick talents.

Thompson’s breakthrough as a writer came with a book on Hell’s Angels that brought him so close to his subjects that they beat him up for it. This immediately became part of his mythology, and symbolic of his desire to be his own story.

That was ironic: Thompson’s hero was F Scott Fitzgerald, and he wanted to write a Great Gatsby for his own time, substituting that author’s polished prose with his own undisciplined flights of carpe diem lifestyle excesses. It was never going to work.

Still, Cowan is rightly prepared to defend as important social documents Thompson’s next two works, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. The latter in particular, by daring to print what other journalists whispered, helped to legitimise Thompson, despite the drug-addled rambling. He appeared on course to uncover “the unholy grail of his literary aspirations: charting the Death of the American Dream”.

But he didn’t. And too much of Cowan’s book takes the form of an apologetic footnote to a career that ultimately foundered. Like a poorly observed cliché, Thompson’s life became bogged down in drugs, affairs, divorce and irrelevant distraction.

He became obsessed by guns. He fell in love with his own image, and his irascibility turned into caricature. The book suffers as we are dragged through the 1980s and 1990s. It is hard to remain interested in the litany of dope, debt and depression.

Thompson ended his life in 2005 as he had occasionally promised, blowing a hole in his head with one of his beloved guns. That act, at least, was as spectacular as his auspicious beginnings as a writer.

Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer