His next stop was San Francisco on the cusp of the hippie revolution, but Thompson was no instant convert. At that point in his life he was much more of a Kerouac beatnik than a Flower Child, preferring to hang out with motorcyclists than longhairs. He had a rough time finding steady work to support himself in the City By The Bay and he moved to Big Sur for awhile to hunt wild pigs in the bush. Later he began following the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang with the idea of collecting material for a book about them. When the Angels discovered he was a writer, they nearly beat him to death, but he got his book published and it attracted a lot of attention in the right circles.

Thompson was in San Francisco for the 1965 Summer of Love and eventually he embraced the goals and the lifestyle of the hippie movement in his own unique way. Years later Thompson reflected on the 60s as a time when "we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave." Looking back at the era's passing, he added with obvious disappointment: "You can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

By the time Hell's Angels appeared in print, Thompson was married and had a young son, Juan, whom he didn't want to grow up to be a "good German." The reference was to atrocities committed by Nazis who claimed they were only doing their patriotic duty by following orders. Hatred of fascism disguised as patriotism was an early hallmark of Thompson's thinking. He was an an old-fashioned patriot who believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for an informed citizenry.

His breakthrough book was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971. It sold millions of copies and opened doors that would otherwise have been closed to Thompson. He decided to make presidential politics his bailiwick, a fateful choice that would shape his writing for the rest of his life. In 1972 he followed the presidential candidates around the country. Among the press corps, he was the odd man out, usually riding on the Zoo plane instead of Air Force One with incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon.

Thompson cultivated a venomous dislike of Nixon and the feeling was mutual. Thompson once said Nixon and his "Barbie doll" family were "America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us. He was a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal."

Thompson recalled standing on the tarmac beside Air Force One while it was being refueled one day. He lit a cigarette and gleefully pondered tossing the match into the fuel to save the country from Nixon. He didn't do it, of course, but this revealed how twisted his imagination could be.

He was nearly as merciless in his assessment of two other presidential candidates in 1972. He called Hubert Humphrey a "ward healer" and wrote: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while." Covering Edmund Muskie, he said, "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat."

Thompson's book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was an immediate success, but he took less satisfaction than he expected because Nixon was re-elected in a landslide victory over the anti-Vietnam war candidate George McGovern.

After the presidential campaign book, Thompson began writing for Rolling Stone and other magazines. He was always late settling in for a writing assignment at some unlikely location, setting the stage for an ordeal of anxiety, missed deadlines and mutual recriminations with his employers. Thompson seemed to work best under these disagreeable conditions. He usually started by getting loaded and wandering around, which seemed like wasting time, but it was his way of absorbing the ambience of the place to cut through the bullshit and reach the pertinent underbelly of what was happening. He put off the actual writing to the last minute when the magazine editor was tearing out his hair by the roots and screaming on the phone for copy to be faxed one page at a time hot off the typewriter. In his deranged state of mind Thompson's thinking went something like this: All I have to do is lash some paragraphs together and send this puppy off before the hyenas move in for the kill.

It was a game Hunter loved to indulge in, particularly with Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner. "A writer must have his little diversions," Thompson once calmly explained to an irate Wenner. The magazines put up with Thompson's slovenly work habits because he was the most insightful (if somewhat warped) journalist of his era.

In practice Thompson honed a revolutionary kind journalism in which the reporter plays a central role in the story. It was in your-face outlaw journalism, but he prankishly named it gonzo journalism after the goofy-looking Muppet character. In traditional journalism reporters are supposed to be invisible and objective in what they write. Thompson chose to inject himself, his strong opinions and his imagination into every article he composed. Some called his writing fiction, but Thompson was quick to point out that a writer's work is ultimately based on his real experiences.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times worried Thompson might some day "lapse into good taste. That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity. And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."

In 1983 Thompson came to Hawaii on assignment to cover the Honolulu marathon. After dismissing the race as "a bunch of Japs running past the Arizona Memorial," he relocated to the Big Island where I happened to live. He arrived in Kona just in time for the worst winter rainstorm in decades. After the storm abated, he went deep sea fishing and noted how the boat captain turned into a Nazi the instant he stepped aboard. But Thompson wore him down and the boat ended up adrift and on fire off of South Point. When Japanese tourists waved from the cliffs, Thompson shouted: "Remember Pearl Harbor!"

In Kona he also met some marijuana growers and made a nuisance of himself at the Kona Inn bar. I deduced this from the reaction of the bartender when I asked if he had seen Thompson lately. He stopped wiping a glass and glared at me hatefully. "No, I haven't. Why?"

My deduction was confirmed later when I read The Curse of Lono, Thompson's book about his long stay in Hawaii. With one exception, he was quite perceptive in his observations of the Aloha State. He noted that native Hawaiians were unfairly forced to live on the margins of island society, but he expressed astonishment that Hawaiians believed sharks were the manifested spirits of their ancestors. Thompson didn't care for sharks, especially not when he was swimming in the ocean.

One passage in the book upset me. I lived in a tropical rainforest on the east side of the island which I considered one of the most beautiful places on earth. After a drive through the area, Thompson described it as "a vast fern wasteland" — a very odd choice of words in my opinion. Apparently, he was turned off by the constant rain I had become accustomed to.

In his later years Thompson mellowed a bit. He traveled less and stayed home to take care of his Colorado farm, which had a peacock as a "watch dog." One photo purportedly shows Thompson feeding a wolverine — one of the most vicious animals on earth. He fooled around with his massive gun collection and had his own firing range on the farm. Two of his drinking buddies were actor Don Johnson and CBS newsman Ed Bradley, who owned homes nearby.

"Nothing exceeds like excess" could have been Dr. Gonzo's motto in his heyday if it hadn't already been used as a buzz line in the film Scarface. Or, as poet William Blake said, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. These sentiments applied to both the life and the writing of Thompson. I try to picture him as the ancient Greek demi-god Pan carrying a typewriter slung over his shoulder, a silver-tongued satyr with mischief always on his mind, but the hooves would have freaked him out. "Holy shit, man," I can almost hear him mutter. "People will think I'm the devil, dig up my grave and beat my corpse like a red-headed stepchild."

Thompson was a shameless ham around cameras — his daughter-in-law hinted at cross-dressing and excessive use of lipstick on occasion — but for all his clownish posturing, he was at heart an intensely private and thoughtful man, according to family members and friends. His public persona was a defense mechanism to keep the world mystified. Dr. Gonzo, we hardly knew ye.

After his close friend and attorney Oscar Acosta vanished without a trace in Mexico (some say in a drug deal gone bad), Thompson wrote this simple eulogy: "He stomped the terra." Hunter Thompson did the same with his own brand of panache.

He requested one song to be played at his funeral — Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man":

Selah!