I was taking twenty-seven college students in two natural-gas-fueled buses across America for a nearly three-month, 15,000-mile educational adventure. Hunter showed me these elk horns when I first met him, in 1993. “He was an old, sick and very troubled man,” Hunter wrote, “and contentment was not enough for him.” After two days of interviewing locals, he came up with a matter-of-fact conclusion about his idol’s sad last days. When Hunter finally arrived at Hemingway’s empty alpine chalet, after journeying 700 miles from Aspen, he was in a feverish, bleary-eyed state of mind. A whiskey-touched Hemingway may have shot lions in the green valleys of Africa, but a rum-besotted Thompson blasted away rats on the garbage heaps of Puerto Rico. To a degree, Hunter was parodying the Lost Generation icon in these early works. His first two narrative efforts, Prince Jellyfish and The Rum Diary, were, in truth, largely Hemingway-derivative, albeit with an original, double-edged twist of sobering invective and inebriated humor. In these pre-gonzo days - before LSD and Freak Power and Rolling Stone were in counterculture vogue - Hunter emulated Hemingway more than any other writer. Thompson was freelancing for the National Observer, he made a pilgrimage to Ketchum, Idaho, in search of why novelist Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in the Sawtooth Mountains courtesy of his trusty 12-gauge shotgun.
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