Editing Hunter S. Thompson (section)

===Writing style===
{{Main|Gonzo journalism}}
Thompson is often credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of writing that blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. His work and style are considered to be a major part of the New Journalism literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to break free from the purely objective style of mainstream reporting of the time. Thompson almost always wrote in the [[first person narrative|first person]], while extensively using his own experiences and emotions to color "the story" he was trying to follow.

Despite him having personally described his work as "Gonzo", it fell to later observers to articulate what the phrase actually meant. While Thompson's approach clearly involved injecting himself as a participant in the events of the narrative, it also involved adding invented, metaphoric elements, thus creating, for the uninitiated reader, a seemingly confusing amalgam of facts and fiction notable for the deliberately blurred lines between one and the other. Thompson, in a 1974 interview in ''Playboy'', addressed the issue himself, saying, "Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They're both much better reporters than I am, but then, I don't think of myself as a reporter." [[Tom Wolfe]] later described Thompson's style as "...&nbsp;part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric."<ref name="wolfetom">{{Cite news |last=Wolfe |first=Tom |date=February 22, 2005 |title=As Gonzo in Life as in His Work |work=The Wall Street Journal |url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006325 |access-date=August 3, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050222142331/http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006325 |archive-date=February 22, 2005}}</ref> Or as one description of the differences between Thompson and Wolfe's styles would elaborate, "While Tom Wolfe mastered the technique of being a fly on the wall, Thompson mastered the art of being a [[fly in the ointment]]."<ref>{{Cite book |date=August 22, 1995 |title=Better Than Sex |author=Hunter S. Thompson |url=http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780345396358.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220415233459/https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/178185/better-than-sex-by-hunter-s-thompson/9780345396358 |archive-date=April 15, 2022 |access-date=July 30, 2010 |publisher=Random House}}</ref>

The majority of Thompson's most popular and acclaimed work appeared within the pages of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine. Publisher Jan Wenner said Thompson was "in the DNA of ''Rolling Stone''".<ref name=wennerbook /> Along with [[Joe Eszterhas]] and David Felton, Thompson was instrumental in expanding the focus of the magazine past music criticism; indeed, Thompson was the only staff writer of the epoch never to contribute a music feature to the magazine. Nevertheless, his articles were always peppered with a wide array of pop-music references ranging from [[Howlin' Wolf]] to [[Lou Reed]]. Armed with early [[fax]] machines wherever he went, he became notorious for haphazardly sending sometimes illegible material to the magazine's San Francisco offices as an issue was about to go to press.

Wenner said Thompson tended to work "in long bursts of energy, awake until dawn, or too often, two dawns." He said keeping Thompson on track when finishing a piece required "...companionship, or what editors call hand-holding, but in Hunter's case it was more like being a junior officer in his war. He required his creature comforts, which meant the right kind of typewriter and a certain color paper, Wild Turkey, the right drugs, and the proper music."<ref name=wennerbook />

Robert Love, Thompson's editor of 23&nbsp;years at ''Rolling Stone'', wrote in the ''[[Columbia Journalism Review]]'' that "the dividing line between fact and fancy rarely blurred, and we didn't always use italics or some other typographical device to indicate the lurch into the fabulous. But if there were living, identifiable humans in a scene, we took certain steps&nbsp;... Hunter was a close friend of many prominent Democrats, veterans of the 10 or more presidential campaigns he covered, so when in doubt, we'd call the press secretary. 'People will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,' he once said, and he was right."<ref name="love-cjr">Love, Robert. (May–June 2005) {{Cite web |date=May–June 2005 |title=''A Technical Guide For Editing Gonzo'' |url=https://www.cjr.org/issues |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070410013416/http://cjr.org/issues/2005/3/hst.asp |archive-date=April 10, 2007 |access-date=June 18, 2024 |website=Columbia Journalism Review}}</ref>

Discerning the line between the fact and fiction of Thompson's work presented a practical problem for editors and fact-checkers. Love called fact-checking Thompson's work "one of the sketchiest occupations ever created in the publishing world", and "for the first-timer&nbsp;... a trip through a journalistic fun house, where you didn't know what was real and what wasn't. You knew you had better learn enough about the subject at hand to know when the riff began and reality ended. Hunter was a stickler for numbers, for details like gross weight and model numbers, for lyrics and [[caliber]], and there was no faking it."<ref name="love-cjr"/>