The Origins of Hunter S. Thompson’s Loathing and Fear

Hunter S. Thompson, Self Portrait, in Striped Chair, ca. 1960.

Hunter Stockton Thompson began writing about politics in the early sixties while working as a roving freelance contributor, in South America, for the Dow Jones–owned newspaper the National Observer. “Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing” is one of the more than a dozen pieces he’d eventually publish on South American politics, but a specific moment, in 1964, at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, seems to have crystalized his broader political perspective. 

At the time, Thompson was just twenty-six; he was living with his wife, Sandy, and infant son, Juan, fifty miles north of the city, near Sonoma. Months earlier, he’d moved to California to serve as the ’s West Coast correspondent, and throughout that spring and early summer he’d written multiple articles on “local color”: who-what-when-where-why travel pieces stripped of political