He was fired from Time for kicking a cola machine.Īfter leaving The Jersey Shore Herald, Thompson headed for New York, where he worked as a copyboy for Time for nearly a year. But his editor had a different story, explaining years later that Thompson had simply been fired after an argument over the content of a sports page. In his 1990 book Songs of the Doomed, Thompson vividly recalled the moment that the enraged journalist appeared at the newspaper office the next day, his face 'beet-red.' Upon seeing the man pull up in the mangled vehicle, Thompson wrote that he hastily left the office, packed his things, and drove to New York. But in his account, he wound up getting the car stuck on a riverbank at the end of the night and had to get a farmer to pull it out with his tractor, tearing the car's door off in the process. While working as the paper’s sports editor, Thompson claimed to have borrowed a journalist’s car to go on a date with the man’s daughter.

Thompson had numerous stories about quitting jobs in hilarious fashion, with one of the most memorable being his hasty departure from The Jersey Shore Herald in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. Thompson quit the Jersey Shore Herald after wrecking a co-worker's car. Here are six well-known stories about Hunter S. Even today, it can be hard to separate the man from the myth. When writing or talking about his own life, he frequently exaggerated or invented stories, which biographers and journalists have reported as the truth even in the years since his death. Thompson was the creator of Gonzo, a bizarre and hilarious form of literary journalism notorious for its hallucinogenic blend of fact and fiction-but his distortion of reality wasn't confined to just reporting.

Hunter s thompson the fear