By Kevin D. Williamson
Saturday, January 10, 2026
Before he was Raoul Duke, played by Johnny Depp in the
movies, or “Uncle Duke” in Doonesbury, or yet another famous rich guy at
the bar in Aspen, Hunter S. Thompson was a hell of a reporter, one with an
animating love of the boisterous possibilities of the English language and an
extraordinarily intelligent eye for the most microscopic details of this
profoundly weird American life. And his unequaled masterpiece was his first
book, published in 1967: Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, a
brilliant account of the real-life adventures of an American motorcycle gang
and the sensational—and almost entirely separate—media-driven legend that grew
up around them.
Hell’s Angels was something new. Its novelty was
not in its reportorial technique: Thompson spent many months embedded with the
infamous motorcycle gang, whose taste for drugs and drunkenness and low living
Thompson shared and whose penchant for histrionic displays of orgiastic
violence and public indecency very much spoke to his sensibility, and was able
to tell much of his story from firsthand knowledge, but other writers, notably Paris
Review editor George Plimpton, already had been
practicing similar if less outrageous
forms of participatory journalism for years at that point. And while
Thompson’s over-the-top sentences and exuberant language remain tons of fun to
read, he wasn’t the first to employ that kind of rushing, tumbling, hurly-burly
style, either: Tom Wolfe had beat him to it by a few years with “There
Goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) That Kandy Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby (RAHGHHHH!) Around the Bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM…).” (Wolfe
not only did it earlier—he did it better.) What made Hell’s Angels
sing was the same thing that would undermine so much of Thompson’s subsequent
work: the person, and then the semifictional literary character, of Hunter S.
Thompson.
Tom Wolfe (of Sherwood Park in Virginia) and Plimpton (of
Fifth Avenue) were American aristocrats, gentlemen who were sharp and at times
merciless observers of the great American spectacle but whose views of American
life were fundamentally benevolent and curatorial, even if Wolfe sometimes
buried his affection under a thick layer of satire in his later years, when he
had turned to fiction. There is something of the old WASP sense of civic duty
and order in their work, something you can still get an aftertaste of in, e.g.,
the films of Wes Anderson, who seems to be very much of a dandyish spirit
kindred to Wolfe’s. Thompson, in contrast, always seemed to be writing from a
point of view a few years in the future from his contemporaries, where he could
see the disasters toward which all that unchained American momentum was
careering at high speed like one of the outlaw bikers who fascinated him. The
world he saw was disordered and, above all, dirty. Like Vanity Fair,
Hell’s Angels is a story without a hero. Thompson seemed to
instinctively understand that Flower Power would end in the Manson cult, that
both phenomena were the fruit of the same bent tree. And he managed to write
about it for a time without too much in the way of moralizing or judgment.
Thompson was not an aristocrat, and nobody likes to épater
le bourgeois like a child of the bourgeoisie. But Hell’s Angels
is not full of shock for its own sake: Thompson saw the darkness and nihilism
at the center of 1960s counterculture sooner and much more clearly than most of
his contemporaries. And that probably is why he was more interested in the
bikers than in the kids at Berkeley, writing: “Unlike the campus rebels, who
with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a
validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the
baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all.”
Unlike many conservative critics of the emerging
counterculture, Thompson was, at least in his early days, able to simply take
it for what it was and look at it as a reporter. It is not for nothing
that so much of Hell’s Angels is taken up by media criticism when
Thompson goes beyond first-person reporting: The great sin that infuriated him
was not the Angels’ raping and pillaging their way up and down California but
that so many reporters—especially New York reporters—got the story wrong. He
points to a New York Times account of a public rape committed by outlaw
bikers at a bar in California.
This incident
never occurred. It was created, as a sort of journalistic montage, by the
correspondent who distilled the report. … The word “alleged” is a key to this
art. ... Nowhere in the story was it either reported or implied that the
Monterey charges had long since been dropped—according to page one of the
report being quoted. The result was a piece of slothful, emotionally biased
journalism, a bad hack job that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow or stirred a
ripple had it appeared in most American newspapers … but the Times is a
heavyweight even when it’s wrong.
There is some irony in that: Hell’s Angels contains
much careful reporting, but Thompson’s later work is distinguished by—and
disfigured by—events that are clearly made up. Sometimes Thompson acknowledges
that he is off on a fantastical fugue, but sometimes he doesn’t—and I suspect
that young Hunter S. Thompson the reporter would have been disgusted by the
laziness and occasional dishonesty of old Hunter S. Thompson the celebrity. The
charitable view is that Thompson’s later work is something like Herman
Melville’s infamously erroneous cetology in Moby-Dick: wrong on any
number of particulars but endeavoring, often with great success, to get a
harpoon in some bigger and more important game.
But the critic does not have to make too many excuses for
Hell’s Angels. As the author himself would later famously put it: “Buy
the ticket, take the ride.”
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