There is no human being within 500 miles to whom
I can communicate anything—much less the fear and
loathing that is on me after today’s murder. . . .
I want to kill because I cannot talk.
—HST, November 22, 1963
It was odd, being home. After a year on smuggler’s boats and sleeping in wooden huts, Hunter was back in Louisville, in his bedroom. He felt strange.
He and Sandy were a beautiful young couple. When Hunter talked about his ambitions, he sometimes wished he had taken the turn toward conventional life, to be the insurance agent, like his father, whose primary goal in life was providing shelter for his family, doing the lives-of-quiet-desperation thing.
But that wasn’t in his genes. He got married to please his mother. The idea of marriage came as a surprise to Sandy. They were staying at Ransdell Avenue. Hunter came home and called to her upstairs and told her to put on a skirt because they were going out. She dressed as well as she could, considering she had her arm in a sling from a horseback riding accident two days before.
It was May 19, 1963. They piled into the car, Hunter and Sandy in back, brothers Davison and Jim up front. Sandy wanted to know where they were going. “Jeffersonville, Indiana,” Hunter announced matter-of-factly. Why, Sandy wanted to know. “Oh,” Hunter shrugged, “to get married.” Indiana allowed for quickie marriages and Kentucky did not.
Sandy passed the Thompson audition. Jim, by now a pre-teenager, was a fan of his new sister-in-law: “Sandy appealed to all of us because she seemed to be so direct, so down-to-earth, and honest. Very beautiful, too. I thought, ‘She’s a great person for Hunter. She’ll probably settle him down.’”
Later, the marriage was consummated in the backseat of the car. For Hunter, the marriage “merely put the stamp of law on a worthy and time-tested relationship.”
Hunter didn’t care for his new mother-in-law, Leah Conklin, and hated Sandy’s father—who had abandoned the family long before and whom Hunter never met. He wanted to be the most important person in Sandy’s life and did not like competition. But he did not refuse Leah Conklin’s wedding gift: a Rambler. Hunter immediately hatched a plan for a cross-country honeymoon, and set off first for a week at the Conklin home in Deland, Florida. As he unpacked his trunks and sifted through his notes, he was able to spin off a few more South American articles for the Observer. Some of his best South American writing, including his stories on the Incas and the lingering vestiges of colonialism, appeared after his return to the states. He did an Observer piece about a folk-music festival in Kentucky, reviewed several new novels, and concluded that American literature was in decline. The Observer also published his hilarious memoir “When the Thumb Was a Ticket to Adventures on the Highway,” in which Hunter bragged that he held the record for hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts.
As the article appeared, Hunter and Sandy, now joined by Agar, drove cross-country. Their eventual destination was Las Vegas, where Hunter was credentialed by the Observer to cover the Sonny Liston–Floyd Patterson heavyweight fight on July 22, 1963. Liston knocked out Patterson in the first round, but Hunter did not file a story. It would not be the last time Hunter contracted to cover a fight and did not deliver.
Paul Semonin had returned from Africa and was back living in Aspen. He’d invited Hunter and Sandy to visit (the “living is easy,” Semonin said by way of inducement). It was added to their itinerary, but a planned short stay turned into a longer residency.
Hunter and Sandy fell in love with Colorado, staying with Semonin for two months, before renting a ranch house about fifteen miles away, in the village of Woody Creek. “These Rockies make the Santa Lucias look like a public park,” he wrote Jo Hudson, out in Big Sur. “Deer are big as hell around here. And Elk are fantastic.”
The hunting, like the rest of life in Woody Creek, had Hunter sounding like a satisfied man. Had he bought into it, that 2.5-kid Rotarian American Dream? Sandy was soon pregnant, and in Woody Creek Hunter had found something he didn’t realize was possible for him: contentment. He kicked around ideas for Observer pieces with Ridley, but balked at anything that would take him away from Sandy and Woody Creek for too long. “Christ,” he wrote Ridley, “my life is genuine pleasure for the first time since I left Big Sur nearly two years ago. I have a dog, a woman, guns, whiskey, plenty of time to work and a [garbage] Disposall.”
Though the Woody Creek rental was the first real home in two years, another move was hanging over his head. They had the place through the fall, but in December the rent was due to increase, and he and Sandy didn’t want to leave.
To get more money, he needed more work, and that would mean he needed to do more than contributing book reviews to the Observer. “I’m in no position now to take a protracted tour,” he pleaded to Ridley. “Sandy would border on a breakdown if I mentioned leaving for a month.” Still, sitting at home was not his thing. He itched to get back into the fray.
Now that he was stateside, he saw the National Observer regularly and took pride in being part of the publication. His analysis of his time in South America had been published in an August issue of the Observer and after rereading his piece about six times, he said, “I feel like a writer again.”
His homecoming had energized him, and he set aside fiction for a while. He toyed with the idea of writing a quasi-memoir of his time as a South American correspondent, with all of his articles included to bulk up the book. He thought of another nonfiction book, one to be drawn from a correspondent’s tour of Mexico, which Ridley wanted him to do. After a piece on Aspen’s skiing industry appeared in the Observer, he kicked to the curb a publisher’s suggestion that he write a book on ski bums. He wanted to write nonfiction, but he wanted it to be significant nonfiction. “I have always looked at [journalism] as a way to get somebody else to pay for my continuing education,” he said. The ski-bum story idea didn’t impress him; it would be the journalistic equivalent of a one-liner.
America in the early 1960s was too interesting, he thought, and writing fiction seemed like self-indulgent literary masturbation. He had more or less decided to put aside writing novels for a while when President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, galvanized his resolve.
Hunter awoke to the news at Woody Creek and immediately responded as a journalist, going into Aspen to get some sense of people’s reaction to the assassination. Angered by what he found—largely, unconcern—he poured his feelings into letters to Paul Semonin and William Kennedy. “I am trying to compose a reaction to the heinous, stinking, shit-filled thing that happened today,” he wrote Semonin. “Now, President Johnson. Jesus. Mother. Fuck. Where do we go from here?”
To Bill Kennedy, now working part-time on a newspaper in Albany, New York, while writing fiction, he wrote, “I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything—much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder. . . . I want to kill because I cannot talk.”
Since he wanted to commit himself to journalism full-time, Hunter began to reconsider the National Observer’s offer of a desk job. He had also long admired the Reporter, a biweekly that was held in high regard by journalists. At the time, one scholar noted, it was “rated only behind Time, U.S. News, and Newsweek as the most referred to of all magazines used in [the] work of reporters.” Getting published in the Reporter would get his work in front of the best in his business. Hunter approached correspondent Dwight Martin about getting on the small, prestigious staff. By way of audition, he did an analysis of race relations in his hometown, which he saw as part of a larger series of political profiles of American cities. While in Louisville for his wedding, he had talked to several people about the city’s evolving race relations, and he now followed up with phone reporting and turned his observations into a piece on the city’s racial problems (“A Southern City with Northern Problems”). Despite its subject—framed as a journey home—the piece was not personal in the way many of his Observer articles were; he simply contrasted the public stance of official Louisville with the resentment of the city’s blacks, who said their reality clashed with the portrayal of race relations offered by the city’s clerisy.
Despite Hunter’s big plans and the by-mail rapport he developed with Martin, the regular, long-term relationship he’d hoped to develop with the Reporter didn’t happen. A regime change forced out Martin, and by early 1964 he was gone. “The Reporter don’t dig me at all no more,” Hunter whined to Bill Kennedy.
The National Observer had launched his career, but Hunter had resisted signing any sort of exclusivity contract with the newspaper. With Sandy pregnant, he didn’t rove much, but while they lived in Colorado, he wrote a score of pieces for the Observer that didn’t require significant travel. He also began regularly contributing book reviews. He reviewed A Singular Man, by J. P. Donleavy, giving himself a chance to finally praise in print a writer who had so greatly influenced him.
Given a fairly free hand to pick his assignments and given the whole western half of the country to roam, Hunter chose to write about misfits and outcasts. He wrote about the leftover beatniks, frustrated miners, deer hunters, and Indian-rights activists.
Hunter’s articles in that period weren’t known for their arresting openings. Classic opening paradigms, such as an arrogant golfer on a South American rooftop, did not present themselves. He worried that he had lost his way. Perhaps his muse had cashed the check and moved on. He often used pedestrian methods to begin his articles: asking questions or using blind quotes, which immediately raised the question of who was speaking. He wasn’t writing breaking news for a traditional newspaper, and the leisurely way he built his stories was standard practice for magazine writing. Slow to build, Hunter often saved some of his best material for deep in the story.
His writing in many cases reverted to standard feature-writing techniques. The adventurousness and the wild tone of the South American articles are subdued. He did an article on Marlon Brando’s attempt to help a group of Indians regain their fishing rights in Washington. Wipe off the byline, and it could easily be mistaken for an Associated Press dispatch for the Sunday features wire; good, but nothing noteworthy in its style.
It’s no surprise that the best pieces were those which tugged at him emotionally. As a longtime admirer of Ernest Hemingway, his pilgrimage to Ketchum, Idaho, was nearly as much about Hunter as about its subject. The resulting piece was part travelogue, part literary criticism, and part elegy, as Hunter delivered a benediction on the writer-adventurer whose influence on his work was considerable: “Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him—not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”
Hunter had made the 700-mile trip from Aspen and was exhausted when he finally arrived at Hemingway’s home. Given an opportunity to look through the house, his adolescent talent as a vandal reemerged, and he took a huge set of elk horns from above the entrance to the home. He stashed them in his car, keeping the horns for the rest of his life. “Forget running with the bulls or reeling in marlins or slaughtering rhinos,” Hunter said years later. “I had Hemingway’s horns, and with that came an immense literary responsibility. It was now ‘Fuck you’ to the competition. I had broken from the pack, and there was no turning back.”
In the spring and with much reluctance, Hunter left the Woody Creek home and, with Sandy eights months pregnant, moved to Glen Ellen, California. It made sense for work. San Francisco, fount of oddball stories, was only fifty miles down Highway 101, across the Golden Gate Bridge. But after six months of near-paradise in Woody Creek, Hunter found it difficult to muster energy for another move.
He hauled a trailer through the mountains and the desert with the little Rambler. There, in the driveway, with his pregnant wife and all of his worldly belongings, he discovered that the owner of the home he arranged to rent had had a change of heart. Hunter found somewhere else to live—a shack, he called it—and plotted revenge on the reneging landlord. The voodoo knowledge he had picked up back in Puerto Rico might come in handy.
But he gave Glen Ellen a chance and took to referring to the home there as Owl House, perhaps in tribute to the idyllic Owl Country Club back home, to which he had escorted so many Louisville debutantes. Or maybe it was because Wolf House—Jack London’s old home—was right across the street. That was one of the reasons he came to Glen Ellen in the first place. In any case, the action was heating up in the Bay Area (the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in its early stages), and Glen Ellen was perfectly positioned for Hunter’s excursions to San Francisco and Berkeley. “Berkeley, Hell’s Angels, Kesey, blacks, hippies . . . I had these connections,” Hunter said. “I was a crossroads for everything.” But the trip from Colorado had nearly killed the Rambler, and Hunter was once again desperately in need of money and a reliable automobile.
In the casual atmosphere of Woody Creek, Hunter had quickly made friends and found bartenders and merchants willing to extend him credit. California was almost another country (he called it the Brazil of North America), and Glen Ellen wasn’t very exciting (California was merely “Tulsa with a view”), so it was back to the old practice of pawning his belongings to make household ends meet.
He made friends with a local orthopedic surgeon named Bob Geiger, and when Hunter’s landlord began snorting about evicting his crazy-writer tenant, Geiger and his wife took the Thompsons in as guests in their home in Sonoma. Geiger said Hunter was a pleasant but somewhat offbeat roommate. “He collected flies on flypaper and sent them off to the editor of Time magazine in New York,” Geiger said. “Some grudge, I suppose.” To create a balance of power and pedigree in the house, Hunter sent five bucks off to an ad he’d seen in the back pages of a magazine and received his mail-order doctor-of-divinity degree. He began referring to himself as Dr. Thompson and punctuated remarks with this afterword: “I am, after all, a doctor.” Friends picked up on the joke, and he was “the Good Doctor” for the rest of his life. He frequently phoned Geiger’s office just so he could leave a message that “Dr. Thompson called.”
Hunter felt that a comeback was on its way, a tacit admission that he had lost his way as a writer since returning from South America. He claimed he had spent more time in South America defending his country than earning a living, but now, as he saw America becoming mired in Vietnam, he wondered whether he would still be able to mount such an impassioned defense.
“I can’t speak the language here,” he complained to Paul Semonin. He had found his voice as a writer, or so he had thought, south of the equator. He still thought of himself as a drifter, young and on the road, but when he opened his eyes, he saw his young wife and now, their son. Juan Fitzgerald Thompson was born on March 24, 1964. Hunter was about to turn twenty-seven. He had always planned to die by that age, yet here he was with a wife and a son. For the first time in his life, Hunter was a man with responsibilities. Being a husband and a father was more burden than joy in his precarious financial state.
He announced his son’s birth to Semonin: “I have a son named Juan. Ten days old. Not a cent in the house and no cents coming in. I am seriously considering work as a laborer. They don’t give scholarships to my type. Beyond that, I am deep in the grips of a professional collapse that worries me to the extent that I cannot do any work to cure it.”
Hunter had an office in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, but couldn’t bring himself to join the cubicle crowd. “I would wander in on off hours drunk and obviously on drugs, asking for my messages,” Hunter recalled. “They liked me, but I was the Bull in the China shop.” Being on the same continent as his editors might not be a good thing. After several serious story ideas were vetoed, a frustrated Hunter finally asked Ridley what the Observer wanted from him. Ridley suggested travel stories.
Friction between writer and editors had been building, and there had been a lot of arguing over his assignments. In South America, Hunter was, as an Observer headline had called him, “footloose.” Now Hunter wanted to write about San Francisco. Much as he sometimes loathed the area, as a resident, he sensed that it would explode with news and cultural shifts in the next couple of years. He had a duty as a journalist to stay near the Bay Area, but felt isolated. “I am in the same condition here as I was in Woody Creek, only in less colorful and pleasant surroundings,” he said. “I have no conversations except on chance meetings in San Francisco. Once a month at best.”
He wanted to get closer to the action, so he moved his family to San Francisco at the end of the summer in 1964. They settled into a hundred-dollar-a-month apartment at 318 Parnassus, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, two blocks away from Golden Gate Park and Kezar Stadium, home of the 49ers.
Pro football was vastly different in the 1960s. It had yet to become the mechanized big business that made it into an economic juggernaut. “I remember going to my first 49er game in 1965 with 15 beers in a plastic cooler and a Dr. Grabow pipe full of bad hash,” Hunter wrote. “The 30,000 or so regulars were extremely heavy drinkers, and at least 10,000 of them were out there for no other reason except to get involved in serious violence.”
Turned out that the Parnassus apartment would be prime seating for a cultural revolution. But the Observer wasn’t interested in those sorts of stories. San Francisco was a little too weird for the typical elbow-patched English professor who read the Observer. Feeling at the end of the road as a journalist, Hunter wrote a letter to President Johnson—on stationery from the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota—offering his services as the next governor of American Samoa. Hunter told the president he was mainly concerned with finding a quiet place to rewrite The Rum Diary, which he had decided to enliven with an interracial sex scene that would shock readers. Instead of just tossing Hunter’s letter into the oddball file, presidential assistant Larry O’Brien (later to head the Democratic National Party during Watergate days) wrote back, promising serious consideration. Hunter thought he had a realistic chance for the appointment.
The Republicans descended on San Francisco for the presidential nominating convention. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona headed the party’s ticket and made his famous vow to the delegates: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Hunter was on the convention floor for the National Observer. He recalled feeling afraid because he was the only person in the building not applauding and stamping his feet in approval of Goldwater. Elect Goldwater, Hunter thought, and there will be another American revolution.
Other members of the Observer staff came to report on the convention, and Hunter got very drunk—so drunk, in fact, that the editors sent a letter of reprimand. If he was going to represent the newspaper, he had to get his act together. Editor Bill Giles had faith that he would. “He always struck me as a very solid citizen.”
Relations with the Observer were becoming strained, and things hadn’t taking off at the Reporter either. On top of all that, Hunter had been dealing with house guests all summer, including his mother and thirteen-year-old brother, Jim. Other guests came, rang up huge long-distance phone bills, then left. He wanted to escape to American Samoa—and he did, in his fantasies. But when he came back to reality, he was another broke writer at a dead end.
Hunter tried driving a cab, but was fired. He lined up at five each morning in the Mission District with the vagrants and winos who earned booze money by handing out fliers for grocery stores. “I was the youngest and healthiest person there,” he recalled, “but nobody would ever select me. I tried to get weird and rotten looking.” Still, he was never picked. Donating blood brought in small change.
He kept trying the Observer, but whatever article Hunter proposed, the editors shot down. They wanted froth, he said, but he wanted to give them substance. He didn’t want to be typecast as the California kook reporter. The strain between correspondent and newspaper grew intolerable. At the beginning of fall 1964, the quarrels became open warfare over a piece on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. He wasn’t telling the editors what they wanted to hear: that the student unrest was nothing more than a high-level tantrum by a bunch of spoiled rich kids.
Hunter sensed that it was something significant. What became the Free Speech Movement began when students returned from the South after taking part in the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter-registration drives. When students began setting up tables on campus to enlist participants for civil rights demonstrations, campus officials shut them down. Only the student chapters of the Republican and Democratic parties could stage membership drives on campus. All that fall, war raged between student protesters and university officials. Students borrowed a tactic from the civil rights movement and staged a sit-in at Sproul Hall, home of the administration.
“I saw it coming,” Hunter said. “There was a great rumbling—you could feel it everywhere. It was wild, but Dow Jones was just too far away.” Hunter was sent off to report on election day on the Idaho–Montana frontier. He got in some hunting, so the trip was not a total waste.
He was depressed. He pondered whether he wanted to get involved in political activism. The Berkeley crowd tugged at his conscience. Paul Semonin had become a committed Marxist, and he and Hunter exchanged impassioned letters, Semonin pushing Hunter toward radical politics. For the moment, Hunter stayed on the fence.
The Observer editors pushed Hunter toward something lightweight, and he tossed them the idea of a cross-country train trip. He planned the trip to coincide with the Christmas holidays, which meant Dow Jones would pay for his family trip to Louisville for Christmas. The Observer went for it, and he ran up a widescreen expense report. But after sixty-five hours on a train—hell for Hunter and his family—the Observer wasn’t happy with the resulting story, which it deemed unusable.
In a way, the rail story (which he titled “Dr. Slow”) was a prototype for what would become known as a Hunter Thompson story, minus the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Hunter came off as a man befuddled by even the slightest wrinkle in his travel itinerary and unable to cope with the simple realities of getting along with others. Part literary reflection, part mad-dog screed at the foibles of modern life, “Dr. Slow” was in the end a diary of an insane cross-country trip with club cars full of people whose sole purpose was making Hunter’s life miserable. Infants howled like fiends, and annoyingly talkative fellow travelers made suicide more attractive with every jolt from the rails. All in all, it was a funny piece and in keeping with the sort of stories Hunter had been sending the Observer for the last couple of years.
But some members of the Observer staff were sharpening their knives. There had always been a faction on the staff that believed Hunter made up stories and quotes. It was nearly impossible to fact-check him when he was in a remote South American village, but closer to home, the office minions who disliked Hunter took their case to editor Bill Giles, an avowed Hunter fan.
“Some of the phrases sounded familiar,” Giles said. “There was some discussion that it came from a writer who did the same sort of thing, going cross-country on trains, in the twenties.” Though Giles did not find smoking-gun proof, there was enough of a staff rebellion that in the name of office harmony, he acquiesced and killed the piece. “There was an abrupt end,” he said, to the Observer’s relationship with Hunter Thompson.
Hunter always told a different story about how he left the Observer. “My final reason for leaving was because I wrote this strongly positive review of [Tom] Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The feature editor killed it because of a grudge. I took the Observer’s letter and a copy of the review with a brutal letter about it all to Wolfe. I then copied that letter and sent it to the Observer. I had told Wolfe that the review had been killed for bitchy, personal reasons.” (As Hunter explained to a friend, “Somebody on the Observer—in a reject position—had worked with Wolfe on the Washington Post and hated the air that he breathed.”)
Dan Greene was on Cliff Ridley’s feature desk at the Observer and recalled the hot Friday afternoon when an angry call came in from Hunter Thompson. “Cliff abruptly hangs up,” Greene said, “grimly strides over to my desk, inhales through his trademark cigarette holder, dramatically clears his throat, and then declares, in a deep, theatrical baritone, ‘I believe Hunter Thompson just called me a pig-fucker.’ ”
Hunter had been reading Wolfe’s work and was jazzed by Wolfe’s flashy prose, and the distinctive psychedelic Edwardian style that went along with it attracted a lot of attention. Wolfe was on television talk shows, featured in magazine articles, and becoming, by default, spokesman for this new kind of nonfiction writing called the New Journalism. Back in North America, Hunter had been reading Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese and saw himself for the first time as part of the gang, even though everyone else seemed to be in New York while he was in a rattrap with a wife and a dog and a kid in California.
He’d written Wolfe a simple fan letter before, but when he sent the review, he was at ease and sure of himself. He wrote colleague to colleague. Wolfe wrote back immediately, wanting to see Hunter’s work, and thus was their long-distance friendship born.
Whatever the cause, Hunter stopped working for the Observer by the summer of 1965. Before the Observer breakup, Hunter and his family had gone to Louisville for Christmas. They went on to New York, to see the McGarrs and other friends in the city. Hunter reunited with his old friend Charley Kuralt, who was becoming famous over at CBS News. Kuralt heard Hunter’s tales of woe and lent him enough money to get the landlord and the electric company to back off. Kuralt and his wife, Petey, treated Hunter and Sandy to a night on the town, which was particularly important to Sandy, Hunter said, since she was stuck home most of the time, doing the devoted-wife-and-mother act.
Hunter had also hoped to hook up with Carey McWilliams, editor of the Nation. California fascinated Hunter and he thought McWilliams’s 1939 book Factories in the Field best showed the Golden State’s cruel underbelly for thousands of migrant workers. Hunter was also working on compiling his photographs for what he dreamed would be a book called The Californians. The outsiders in California culture fascinated Hunter, and after reading McWilliams’s book, he thought he and the editor had a lot in common. McWilliams had written Hunter just before he left on the trip, mostly to say he admired his work in the National Observer, and sniffing around to see whether he might have something to submit to the Nation.
Hell, yes. Hunter was thirsting for new markets. He had been depressed, feeling that his writing career was dead, and trapped in a crumbling marriage with the National Observer. His other marriage wasn’t so great either, and now he was a father on top of everything else. Trapped. It was a lot of stuff for a footloose malcontent to deal with. Life was uninspired, and he needed that letter from McWilliams as his kick in the ass.
The Nation wouldn’t pay the kind of money he would get from Playboy or the Saturday Evening Post, but those magazines didn’t seem interested in what Hunter wanted to write. The Nation was another story. It had a long and distinguished history as a liberal journal with a stellar roster of contributors. He respected McWilliams and admired the Nation for stirring up trouble. “The Observer has taken great pains to keep me doing harmless, nonpolitical stories and I am now casting around for other founts of cash,” he wrote McWilliams. He tried to give McWilliams some idea of his desperate situation: “I am long past the point of simple poverty and well into a state of hysterical destitution.”
Hunter peppered McWilliams with story ideas: the Free Speech Movement, a spin-off from the cross-country train trip, a screed on what he called the final collapse of the myth of San Francisco. He also pumped an idea from one of Sandy’s many drudge feed-the-family jobs. She worked as a phone solicitor for a dance studio that instructed its employees to avoid interesting black people in the program. They hung up on “recognizably black” people. If they learned only after making their pitch that the sucker on the line was black, they had to back out of the deal gracefully.
Interesting, but not enough for McWilliams to want a story. He liked the Berkeley story, and Hunter would eventually publish his account of the Free Speech Movement in the Nation in late summer 1965. The magazine’s liberal audience no doubt found Hunter’s sympathetic account more palatable than the Observer’s more cautious copy editors would have. The article was prophetic in its speculation about where the students would go and the scope of the movement they were inspiring.
But it was an idea that came from McWilliams, the suggestion that Hunter look into the story of an outlaw motorcycle gang, that piqued Hunter’s interest. The story changed the trajectory of his life.