It is indeed a very sad day.

Hunter S. Thompson, one of America's great writers and journalists committed suicide Sunday night in his fortified compound near Aspen, Co.

He was a journalism pioneer, a leader of the so-called "new journalism" movement of the 1960's and 1970's, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Gay Talese. His unique form, "gonzo" journalism, relied heavily on first-person storytelling, in which the person telling the story becomes a central character of the story. His writing also reflected severe hyperbole, embellishment, opinions and half-truths, but Thompson made no apologies for his style, and readers embraced him. His unique storytelling ability and voice were unmatched, in my opinion, by anyone of his generation.

While many other writers viewed his style as unorthodox and sloppy, Thompson was a carefully-measured perfectionist with his own work. He re-wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas six times before sending it for publication. His pieces appear to be stream-of-conciousness reporting and storytelling, but were actually carefully crafted, with each sentence heavily scrutinized. He was a genius.

Hunter Thompson was my favorite writer, and it's a very sad day for me to see him pass. Had his death not been a suicide, I think the news would have come easier, but as suicides always do, they leave more questions asked than answered. I had always wanted to interview him; to spend a few days drinking beer and shooting clay pigeons (or eagles or bears or whatever else he could get his hands on at Owl Creek, his farm in Woody Creek.) but I'll never get that chance.

I fell in love with his writing on ESPN's Page 2 -- of all places. I distinctly remember the article that piqued my interest. A compulsive gambler, Thompson wrote of an NFL game in which the Indianapolis Colts won a game in the last seconds. He referred to Colts kicker Mike Vaderjagt as "that king bitch of a kicker," and "Magic Mike, the kicking fool out of Canada" and how he "drilled the bastard (football) straight through the uprights like a guided missle." http://espn.go.com/page2/s/thompson/021125.html

I had never seen sports writing like this, and I was intrigued. I immediately scoured his archives and, over the course of a week, read every HST article I could find on ESPN.com and several other websites. I couldn't get enough of his first-person accounts of stories and his nuanced literary devices. To me, HST re-lit the journalism flame in my belly, and got me excited about writing all over again. His style was just SO unique and refreshing.

My favorite story of his was his first foray into his invented "gonzo" style called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." You can find this article, which was originally published in the June 1970 issue of Scanlon's Monthly (now defunct), and reprinted in his book The Great Shark Hunt. He and a Welsh cartoonist, the now-famous Ralph Steadman spent a few days in Kentucky for the Derby, amongst the gluttony, excess and decadence of the attendees. Thompson details his drunken, sleepless journeys with an unorthodox foreign illustrator at the All-American Derby and takes every chance to embellish on events. Per protocal for Thompson, he was bumping up against deadline, and he had "blown his mind, couldn't work," and "couldn't get anything written in a coherent sequence," so to ease his editors, he ripped pages out of his notebook, numbered them and faxed them to his editors at the magazine. Scanlon's published his notes mostly as they were, and a new breed of journalism was spawned. At the time, Thompson said he thought he would be finished as a journalist -- that he thought his run as a writer was over. Instead, the story turned into his major breakthrough as a journalist -- this new, unique style of writing which relied on an extreme injection of the writer into the story, which he would call "Gonzo."

It's a must read for most anyone interested in the evolution of journalism and literary devices.

He was my favorite writer. I've also had the pleasure of having one of his old editors from Playboy as my magazine writing professor, David Standish. Standish edited Thompsons stories over the course of an 8-10 year timeframe, and has several "Hunter stories," that he loves to tell, including one where HST was at a party hosted by Standish in Chicago and lit another journalist's hair on fire.

The news of Thompson's death saddened but didn't surprise Standish. He had talked of how Thompson had been an advanced alcoholic for several years, and his condition was deteriorating quickly. Thompson's life-long heavy drug use, cigarette smoking and alcohol abuse no doubt led to his demise, but it's someting that one never sees in the rear-view. It's just plain sad. We all wished Hunter would have just vanished from the face of the earth one day, to go out the cryptic and enigmatic manner that he came into the American spotlight. But, in a way fitting of his hard-living, maverick lifestyle, his suicide comes as no surprise.

He will be missed.

Hunter Thompson. July 18th, 1937 - February 20th, 2005.