Thompson completed The Rum Diary, his only novel to date, before he turned twenty-five bought by Ballantine Books, it finally was published-to glowing reviews-in 1998. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs-all of which ended badly-before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson wrote, “Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence.” In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hunter S. Interviewed by Terry McDonell & Douglas Brinkley Issue 156, Fall 2000
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |